


Degrees of Latitude

by x_los



Category: David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, First Time, Gender or Sex Swap, Genderswap, Jealousy, Pining, Secret Relationship, Victorian, Virginity, Virginity or Celibacy Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-17
Updated: 2016-08-17
Packaged: 2018-08-09 08:12:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7794118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Davida Betsey Trotwood Copperfield has an undisciplined heart, and though very well brought up indeed, she is not proof against the temptation to repose foolish confidences where they are not, perhaps, deserved. </p><p>Uriah Heep would have married Agnes Wickfield for financial security and never felt himself emotionally involved by any of it. Mr Wickfield's remarriage to Clara Copperfield ruins that prospect in several ways at once.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Degrees of Latitude

Uriah Heep had been with Davida Copperfield’s household longer even than she had. He had come to work for Davida’s father when he had been eleven. Davida had moved to Canterbury four years later, when she herself had been. For though she called Mr. Wickfield her father, and thought of him as such (without any diminution of duty towards the man she’d never known, that being the father buried in the church yard near Blunderstone Rookery, where he had died and she had been posthumously born), Mr Wickfield was in fact her step-father rather than her natural parent. Davida Betsey Trotwood Copperfield’s great aunt, the original Betsey Trotwood, had taken a keen interest in Davida upon her birth (or shortly before it, having arrived at the Rookery alarmingly and without warning on the very day of that event, and possibly having actually precipitated it on that account). This Aunt Betsey had, in due course, introduced Davida’s widowed mother to her lawyer, who was himself a widower.

At length, these two lonely souls had come to know and to greatly esteem one another, in part on account of their shared sorrows and in part due to a compatible difference of temperament between them. Mr Wickfield was grave (and somewhat given to unwholesome brooding), while Clara Copperfield, for all she missed her husband and honoured his memory, was of both a lighter and a softer temperament. Mr Wickfield believed he saw in his friend a true love for her child that did not seem the selfish sort that would stop at her own issue and advance no further. He judged correctly, for Clara was an easy kind of woman, who could not have helped liking mild, genteel little Agnes Wickfield, the sole daughter of her father’s house. Indeed Clara would not have been unkind to Agnes even if she hadn’t liked her, for Clara Copperfield found unpleasantness horrid and distressing, and almost cried if people so much as came to cold or bitter words before her.

Sensible of the defects of the solitary upbringing he was providing his daughter, Mr Wickfield had welcomed the opportunity to secure for his child both the support mature feminine companionship could offer her and a sister her own age to share her days with. Clara also brought with her into the household a most dependable retainer, a stout and loyal woman called Peggotty, who helped her manage domestic affairs. Indeed, these new additions to the Wickfield home brightened Agnes’ life considerably (not to mention the degree to which they diminished the work young Agnes undertook the manage the home). If too light to be exactly a model and guide to her grounded stepdaughter in all regards, Clara Copperfield was nonetheless a reasonable, likable woman and mistress, and her adult presence in the house allowed Agnes to be a little more conscious of her own girlhood. If Agnes Wickfield thus led an orderly life without any of the excitements, disruptions and seductions of a fairy story, then she at least avoided being a very Cinderella. (Indeed it was her fanciful, decidedly unwicked step-sister who more came in for that sort of thing.)

No, if anyone was discomfited by the change in arrangements it was not Agnes but, at least initially, Mr Wickfield’s clerk. The aforementioned Uriah Heep would later look back on his early irritation with Davida’s presence in the household with amusement, for he knew that at the start he had not even slenderly understood how terrible the alteration would actually prove to be—much less how wonderful. Either way, these upheavals proved a great disturber of his peace of mind.

Uriah was, like Davida, fatherless. He’d been pulled out of a charity school at ten upon having been made so, and sent to earn his meagre bread (and to provide for his widowed mother, besides). In a year or so, he’d been given a position as the merest copy-boy in this respected attorney’s establishment. Even at fifteen, Uriah’s command over the business had been steadily advancing, and he had developed certain plans to one day marry his employer’s child and thus come into the firm. Uriah considered this a kind of just revenge against the patronising charity of Mr Wickfield, who was so kind as to allow a child to work its life away, to slave for long hours to benefit him, and against the whole society that called this common exploitation benevolence: that had made Uriah’s ancestors poor and himself fatherless, with no prospect for advancement but slow, servile creeping, exerting and abasing himself mightily to move a single rung up the ladder. If no way he might conduct himself could possibly be considered correct—his assertiveness would be called presumption, and his deference unappetising or put-on; if nothing, indeed, would serve but his having been born rich (an oversight he never could go back and correct)—then Uriah resolved to be so unappetising that all of them could choke on it. Put-on, did they call it? Why, he’d wear a thousand grotesque masks so that no one would see his true face or purposes—say anything, and in so doing say nothing at all. Uriah learnt his part by ‘art. He gave a masterfully over-the-top performance of the humility the world so wanted of him, and even did the world one better, making a weapon of servility as an act of war.

In Clara Copperfield and her daughter, Uriah found he had two new inheritors to contend with. He knew Wickfield would be less easily worked on now for a start, with a family to bolster him and to whom he knew himself to be responsible. Even if Uriah successfully manipulated the situation so as to secure Agnes, it would all be for naught. Agnes would no longer inherit the whole of her father’s fortune when Mr Wickfield perished. It should pass to his wife, and thence to both daughters. For her part, Clara Copperfield was young (and not as worn down by life as she might have been, buttressed by the steady servant she’d brought with her and the interested support of the indefatigable Miss Trotwood). Clara Copperfield—or he should say, Mrs Wickfield—looked likely to live a long while.

Uriah resented the newcomers for their unwitting overthrow, and privately vowed that they too should feel his vengeance on account of it. He hated little Davida especially, for she was a well-kept, bright and bouncing, chubby, pretty, energetic girl who seemed everywhere, who had a thousand questions, and who taunted him (unless she asked in pure innocence) with the futility of his desperate aspirations by flatteringly suggesting that one day he might rise to be a partner in her new father’s firm.

Thwarted plans to marry her aside, Uriah had never liked Agnes, and didn’t think there was much to like. As the years advanced and the young people of the household grew to man and womanhood, his opinion towards her did not grow more favourable. As a young woman, Agnes was a moral, picture-perfect but unanimated, _peaceful_ creature. She’d features like a statue: noble, but with about as much chance of warping into an ugly frown of genuine anger or an unflattering expression of uncontainable delight as a figure in marble’s. Uriah would have preferred any alterability of that kind to their still, composed handsomeness. He found her about as entertaining as a sermon (and he hadn’t much taste for religion). If Agnes had resented being made to run her father’s household at such a tender age, if Agnes had _possessed_ a temper she forced into submission, or if Agnes had even been much interested and engaged in the world about her, Uriah might at least have respected her as an adversary—another player in the game. But she had other qualities (if you could call them that—he never could, himself), and so he didn’t. Considered outside the question of economy, Uriah no more wanted to marry Agnes than he wanted to climb a rope ladder down to the depths of the ocean and drown there. But then Uriah considered nothing actually outside the question of economy, if it were rightly thought on. (All the aspersions people who’d been brought up with money to spare cast on venal thinking were, in his book, only another layer of veiling hypocrisy.)

In contrast, as time passed Uriah found he _liked_ Davida as much as he hated her (and that was a good deal), or even more. Uriah longed to absolutely ruin Davida’s life, but as time wore on it became difficult for him to justly say that this desire had nothing to do with how small a part of it belonged to him. Everything that made it easy to figure _her_ as an adversary likewise made her, as their years advanced, easy to figure in other positions. Davida couldn’t hold still: her mind whirled as his own did. Not on treasons, stratagems and spoils as his, but on people and their arrangements and the play that phrase had come from, which she’d read aloud to him one evening as he worked, her mobile voice making a grand theatre out of his cold, cramped office. Davida kept later hours than the rest of her family, and she was so spoilt that this irregular behaviour and accompanying waste of candles was permitted without question or complaint. She was sociable, and when no one else was about the house she came to the room where Uriah worked his late hours because she seemed to prefer his company to none whatever.

Davida was just as full of question and comment and imagination at seventeen as she had been at eleven. And if anything, she got more ‘everywhere’ even than she had as a child. This handsome young woman with coiled ropes of shining brown hair, curls that were forever escaping these confinements, and a quicksilver, expressive face was in front of Uriah’s kitchen window as she walked purposefully to school with her sister (rarely tired and lagging, despite the hours she kept, for Davida had the energy of a steam train). She seemed the Queen of Canterbury, and always to be on show, promenading through her domain so the common folk could get a good look at their ruler.

Davida was in the local gazetteer when he read it belatedly over his equally belated supper—she’d won a small writing prize the previous year, and her deft touch had so delighted the editor that, after this winning entry had been printed, he’d encouraged her to contribute further sketches. (Davida did not restrict herself to character observations: some quite sharp commentary on the state of public records-keeping in Canterbury had embarrassed the officials and resulted in some long overdue revisions to this system. The editor tried to keep Davida off social topics and, Davida being young, he was at present mostly succeeding. It was fairly obvious to Uriah, however, being in possession of the whole of a brain as he was, that this poor man would not succeed _long_.)

She strode about the Wickfield residence with unthinking ease: Davida was in Uriah’s office, fetching something for her father, riffling around his desk with her small hands. She was passing back out again in a compression and release of skirts and a flutter of perfume, trailing ribbons, the bows of which awoke in Uriah an unholy compulsion to grab one passing ribbon’s end and pull until the thing came undone and Davida was mussed and spoilt. He fondly thought of her thus ruined. Pretty, insufferably well-brought-up Davida’s ample, bound curls a perfect wreck about her shoulders; her fair complexion hot with some disturbance; her dress dishevelled; her breast (which heaved when she was impassioned: which was cursedly, blessedly often) free of its several layers of constriction; her crisp, proper accent and ringing, declamatory tones a soft slur of his name in his ear.

He thought about it constantly, and never could stop himself. He dreamed about her, and when he shut his eyes in waking life Davida almost seemed to paint the inside of his lids, so frequently did she float up into his mind. She was the symbol and embodiment of his dispossession, and she was also, he felt sure, the only creature other than his mother that he ever could love.

And he did, too. Considered outside the question of economy (an act of mental acrobatics which suddenly seemed possible, in her special case), Uriah did indeed wish to marry Davida. In fact he wished it beyond anything. There again, economically, it was _such_ a good idea that it was also impossible. Davida would come into a fortune on her aunt’s side. She was as sentimental as her mother (if, Uriah would say in his beloved’s defence, eminently sharper: Davida’s earnest romanticism wrapped itself around a wit as swift and piercing as a shank to the guts, and it could be just about as unsparing, too, before she checked herself). And being sentimental, Davida might just marry a poor young man of comely appearance and heroic character, if the fancy took her. Though it’d probably be a _rich_ young man with those attributes, all things considered. That was the way of the world, was it not? Never mind how much easier a man might find it to develop these extraneous qualities with wealth to gentle his mind, not to mention his features. Still, that wouldn’t avail him. Uriah knew himself to possess the appearance and character of a lesser servant of Lucifer. He lacquered over his nature with an obsequiousness that took in and pleased people who wanted to be taken in and thus flattered, but he was fairly certain that his manner did _not_ please Davida, and that she looked on him with as much horror as grim interest in his antics.

And since any connection between himself and Miss Davida Copperfield was so wholly unconsidered, so ludicrous a prospect that no one (not even her sharp-eyed Aunt Betsey, rendered somewhat wary of men by a poor experience with an unkind husband) had thought to suspect, much less to _fear_ it, Uriah was granted an unusual degree of license with this young woman. They were often alone together, and like perfect Knights of the Garter, no one so shamed themselves as to think evil of it. If he touched her too often, or in too familiar a fashion, what of it? If he dropped a cold hand on Davida’s arm to show her something, it was not forward. How could it be? He’d known her five years! It was simply his manner. If Uriah’s habit of almost writhing as he spoke at times brought him closer to Davida than politeness might have mandated, this hardly registered. If, as they brushed past one another in the tight spaces of his office, his long, clever fingers skated for an instant over her hip, just where the skirt broke from the bodice and there was but one layer of fabric between his fingertips and the inviolate skin of her flank, it was simply an accident, and hardly to be regarded.

Though Davida’s breath caught, just slightly, when such accidents happened, and Uriah listened for these little tokens that she did in some measure regard it. He felt an unfurling of want in his stomach at the resulting slight flush of her cheeks, even as he kept his own expression polite and sedate, ever-so-obliging.

In the general way, Uriah schemed fruitlessly, like a boiling-over-kettle, for some path for himself in the world. He suspected that he was, to his own darling, at best a strange, unsavoury character and at worst a total non-entity: a piece of her father’s furniture, to be discarded when it grew too old for use, like the desk or the ink well he himself was permitted to employ in his work. But he knew at least this—Davida wanted him, in some slight degree. He could awaken in her a no doubt confusing and unwelcome pulse of desire, and thus, like a cloudy ancient mirror, call up a pale reflection of his own detested love. For Uriah had never reconciled himself to loving Davida—much less to doing so wretchedly, and, were it known, without any recompense but humiliation. To being a mere triviality, too, for what should it matter to Davida if one more person loved her, when she was the pet of all her acquaintance? Yet it did matter, at least to him, and he’d stab himself through the heart before he endured an hour of Davida’s pity.

And he’d half a thought, with a year’s worth of touches, to coax her into something. He knew not what, exactly. But Davida was passionate, and her heart could run away with her (if not, he’d wager, with him). Didn’t you tame wild things like that? Lulling them with terrible patience, showing them you were infinitely willing to wait—making them see how you were friendly, so they’d come ever closer. These brushes were both a satisfaction and a torment to him, and perhaps they accustomed Davida to such liberties (and possibly to additional ones). 

She’d a weakness for novels. Austen, over and again. _The Yellowplush Papers,_ as they came out in Fraser’s Magazine. Any adventurous tale with enthusiasm, some classical writers (fewer, she said, than she probably ought to have read—the point being, she supposed, to have read them, rather than to have enjoyed doing so) and more poetry. He’d see her curled up with her books and resent her leisure hours, and yet simultaneously wish that time never taken from her, especially not (as was likely) by cares and the responsibilities attendant on being someone’s wife. She licked a finger, sometimes, to turn a page in a new-cut book, and he struggled not to shudder when she unconsciously graced him with such a display.

A year or two, that was all—they’d come knocking, and Uriah would have to try and do for them: all the men who complimented pretty Miss Copperfield in idle chat in public houses even now, observing what handsome girls Wickfield had. Uriah took the compliments as if on their behalf, expertly putting these admirers off with his too-fawning agreement. But it wouldn’t hold, he knew, for Davida herself was his enemy here, and she beat him so soundly that anyone would think she set out to do it on purpose. She’d grown up fresh, compassionate and quick, with a ready capacity for being pleased. She was _rich_ , and pleasant, and fair as morning. Oh, they’d come for her, and Uriah would want to see them buried before their time—especially given that susceptible Davida could be expected to come to love some of them in turn.

Still, at present, Davida had little thought of courtship. She kept at home, and spent her evenings instead reading European gothic novels with half-wicked glee, in translation or in French (sometimes translating passages of these out loud for him, when the fancy took her). There were, however, some French novels Davida read alone in her room. After such a session, she emerged looking obviously flushed and guilty. Uriah thus had a fair idea of their contents. They wouldn’t be pornographic, he knew—they’d be sweeping romances of a heroic or earthy cast, which would awaken certain delectable feelings in Davida’s young breast. Scenes of love would be described in inexplicit but lavishly evocative terms. Flowers in the garden that was a maiden’s breast would ripen and bloom to a point of ludicrous fecundity; passion’s waterfalls would pound and thunder fit to break the rocks beneath ‘em, and so on and so forth. Uriah’s heart always skipped a beat when, with an embarrassed expression (which Davida buried under an attempt to look especially adult and queenly, a trick which always made her look younger than her unconscious self-command did), Davida accepted such a package from the postman (‘yes, that is mine’ in a voice that never failed to squeak—‘just some books, Agnes’, with a great effort at off-handedness).

Such habits hardly surprised Uriah, for he knew Davida to be a sensual girl. She was always brushing her fingers against the smooth wood grain of the stair rail as she descended the house’s steps, or absently petting the silk of her dress when she’d no other work for her hands. Uriah suspected her of possessing a keenly romantic, carnal temperament. People thought that sort of thing natural or admirable in a young man, and dangerous in a young lady. Uriah thought it both, for she was, to his vexation, always falling in and out of infatuations (even as she seemed to have an abiding physical fascination with himself).

It was late one evening, and Uriah was nearly ready to trudge home, disappointed, when Davida slipped into his office. Uriah’s mood brightened considerably at this, even as he resigned himself to staying longer. Her arrival was, after all, the very possibility he’d been waiting for: the prospect of her company, of a little time alone with her. Davida perched on her usual chair at the secretariat in the corner of the room (which only she really made much use of) and made distracted conversation with Uriah. He could detect a slight hint of furtiveness in her eyes, and the barest trace of pink in her cheeks, and by these signs he knew (with a delicious shiver at working it out) what she’d been occupying her evening with thus far. He thought what a tyranny it was, that the same social order that demanded he keep his place and never rise, neither for his cleverness nor for his labour, should keep this girl from getting what she seemed to need, and what he’d gladly have given her.

“Should you like some coffee?” Davida asked suddenly, twisting a curl around her finger absently (an action that never failed to give rise to a pang of hunger in Uriah, as though he were all of a sudden starving). “It’s late, I know, but then you do seem to still be working, and I think perhaps I might.”

“Oh, allow me!” Uriah insisted, deliberately confusing the matter by standing and advancing even as she did, so that they came to meet in the narrow strait between their desks (he liked to think of them as such, and he enjoyed Davida’s habit of coming to work here some evenings, sharing the light: they were both of them diligent students, and it felt mighty companionable). He hoped for nothing more than another of his thrilling brushes against her: for once, his ambitions were constrained to quite a reasonable goal.

Only he’d misjudged the choreography of tonight’s figure, and the timing, too. As with Davida’s coming itself, this was both curse and boon to him.

***

Davida knew by the way that Uriah started, and by the way his normally perfect servile façade was ripped away and then hastily reattached, that Uriah hadn’t intended to crash into her. Of course he hadn’t—why _would_ he have done, even in an outburst of his accustomed perversity? Thus, equally, he had not meant, in crashing into her, to brush her breast with his long-fingered hand. He _certainly_ hadn’t meant for his thumb to skate over her nipple so as to give it a hard flick, muffled by the bodice of her dress but still palpable, as he pushed by her. She was wearing a corset that supported her breasts from underneath, but only a thin shift between that region of her anatomy and her outer gown. Her attire was perfectly decent of course, but it was hardly proof against every accident (and she had noticed a peculiar correlation between reading the yellow-jacketed French volumes and certain anatomical responses, the degree to which her breasts were sensitive and her nipples prominent not least among them).

It was excruciatingly embarrassing, but they could of course forget such an accident had ever occurred. Or at least they might have done, if Davida hadn’t gasped audibly at the strange sensation and, without making any decision to such an end, half lurched into his hand. Her face felt hot, and it was as though there were threads stretching from her breast down into her stomach, where they knotted tightly.

Davida expected Uriah to step back, offering a thousand bewildered, over-sweetened apologies. She did not expect him to curl his fingers around the whole soft mound of flesh in his hand and _squeeze_ lightly, so that her nipple pressed into his palm even through the fabric, and his finger tips (she stared down at them, feeling unable to look away) dug into the cloth and the flesh beneath it. No, not her stomach. The touch sent a pulse of almost painful sensation down lower still than that.

“Uriah!” she whispered in alarm, casting her eyes up at him and watching him shudder as she said his name.

He had at times a mesmerist’s trick of holding her eyes with his own, which seemed to change colour with his mood. They had at present an unholy green light she’d never noted in them before. Davida felt herself almost entranced by this unexpected change (and so distracted by the events that she forgot entirely how her mother had told her a year ago that, now that she was a young lady, it wasn’t quite appropriate to go on calling Uriah simply that, and that Mr Heep would suffice).

“Oh,” said Uriah (for thus she still thought of him), “to be called Uriah spontaneously by you.” He paired this comment with another roll of her breast, bringing his other hand up to perform the same office on its counterpart. Davida glanced down at this second invasion of her person, feeling unable to help doing so. Strangely, even noting the way her breasts fitted into his great hands sent another staggering impulse of feeling through her. She had grown from a chubby girl to a callipygian, ‘well-rounded’ young woman, and yet he managed to contain her neatly. His bony hands looked skeletal on these plump portions of her—as though he were Jack Spratt dandling his wife, or something out of a plague illustration: death himself, carnally entwined with a seemingly healthy girl.

Davida lost track of these morbid imaginings as Uriah drew the fingertips of his right hand over her bodice and, securing the peak he must have felt there between his powerful thumb and forefinger, pinched her nipple cruelly though the fabric.

Davida opened her mouth, and she made a wordless little cry. “That _hurts_ ,” she whispered then, even as she felt the continuing pressure down to her knees. “Uriah, we oughtn’t—”

He twisted harder for that, and Davida thought oh, I ought to _slap_ him, even as pleasure lanced through her, twisting its way through her very substance like the veins in a piece of marble, or June lightening through a heavy sky. She should, she knew, protest her virtue in a loud, clear voice, calling the man before her to his senses. But even as she was opening her mouth to do it Uriah released his abused prisoner and began to soothe the whole area with strokes of his palm. He caught her waist up in one great hand and used the other to continue this program of comfort, until Davida was gasping and shaking slightly.

“It isn’t wicked,” he said in answer to her soft protest to that effect. “Not a bit of it. I’m not hurting your virtue, am I? I shan’t impinge on your virginity in the slightest. Why I’m only touching you, Miss Copperfield, above your clothes and all!”

Davida made a fierce face at him. “I am not stupid, Heep. I know when a thing isn’t moral.” The pulling, pooling sensation at work inside her struck Davida as on the wrong side of the law, somehow or other, even if what he said was quite true.

“Ah,” he said, “but do you know not to be over-nice? For there’s immoral, and there’s the sort of legal technicality of a white lie, or a nothing of that nature, that ain’t rightly to be regarded.” He pinched her with both hands now, and she bucked against him and resented him all the more for it.

“Don’t you ever touch yourself?” he asked softly, and without thought she _did_ smack him for suggesting it. He grinned against the light slap, his tongue pressing for an instant against the inside of his offended cheek, as if savouring the sting. “I’d a feeling you did. As do I, you know, in my different way, and most everyone, I expect! And _that’s_ certainly not being unchaste, is it? I’m just helping you to that end, Miss Copperifeld—but a little better. An’ I’d do it as your own, dear friend.”

“The door isn’t even locked,” Davida pointed out. She felt her reason beginning to consent to an argument she knew to be in agreement with the letter of the law rather than with its spirit, and sought to arrest what increasingly looked like an uncontrollable chain of events, in which her own weak-willed complicity played too great a part.

“There’s a point,” Uriah muttered sharply, dragging her by the hand towards that fixture. “Good of you to mention it. Oh I daren’t let you go,” he said by way of explanation, “for fear you’ll grow skittish and I’ll lose your company.” He kicked a draft excluder into place despite the warmth of the night—to stiffle noise, Davida realized.

Davida’s back hit the door, and his hands were back on her, one slipping down her covered stomach to hitch in what seemed to be his favourite spot—the little slip between her skirts and her corset. The push of his palm down the plane of her torso made her ache.

“Lock it, why don’t you?” Uriah said in an insinuating, suggestive tone, as though he were encouraging her to take another of his mother’s awful tea-cakes.

Davida swallowed. “This is madness,” she said, firmly as she could manage. “Men cannot help but take advantage of situations such as this, and they are not to be trusted,” she said as if by way of recitation. “You’ll certainly try to compromise me. This shouldn’t have gone so far as it is.”

Uriah shook his head, giving her his strange, stark grin. “But it has done, Miss Copperfield! ‘n for my part, I swear I won’t ‘arm your chastity on my very life, or on anything you care to name—in fact,” his smile seemed to stretch, “let’s make the act impossible, why don’t we?”

She gave Uriah a bewildered, suspicious look, and he dragged his hand still further down to cup, through the skirt and her petticoats, her womanhood. It wasn’t easily got at, with such a deal of fabric between them, but even so the weight of his fingers against her made Davida press desperately up against his hand.

“It won’t take but a moment,” he encouraged. “An’ if I do anything you don’t agree to, why you can bolt out the door, seeing as you won’t yet have locked it. It’d be the work of a moment. But if I render myself incapable of taking certain steps against you, why then you can lock aforesaid door with your own fair hand, and we can improve on your present knowledge of these harmless forms of gratification. I’d be only too delighted to be your assistant in this.”

“I see that you would,” Davida said sharply, shoving him a step back from her and tilting her chin up to address him loftily. “Though precisely what is in it for _you_ does elude me rather.”

“Does it?” Uriah asked, seeming, for his part, amused. “Well, perhaps I’ll try and explain it to you some time. Now what I propose will take me but a minute—or you but an instant.”

“Riddles, Uriah?” Davida asked, striving for coolness despite the feverish warmth of her body.

He grinned deeper. “You might say that—I’m sure it’s been the subject of ‘em before now, or that you could come up with one for it, your always being so clever with words. Your mother’s told you how men and women manage the business you’re afraid I’ll transact with you in some detail, then?”

“She has,” Davida said, wondering suddenly whether she was at present bluffing in coming off so confident about something she in fact knew little of. Davida also wondered whether her mother’s knowledge had been delivered in full.

“Well then you’ll know that it takes a man, even with such inspiration before him, a good deal of time to recuperate between performances. With your back against the door, no one’s liable to get in here. Ergo if, in your present discreet attitude, either you or I remove my _ability_ to take advantage—”

Davida’s eyes widened. Somehow the idea of his proposing to gratify himself before her shocked her, even in the midst of all this. Yet with one hand on the doorknob, Davida watched, unable to look away, as Uriah unbuttoned his flies. She was thus introduced to an object she had only hitherto heard tales of, which had assumed an almost mythical status in her imagination. If it was less awesome than a gryphon or the like, it seemed a good deal more practically useful.

“See,” Uriah said, palming his member in his hand and giving it a hard stroke, “now is that anything to be frightened of?”

“You’ll hurt it!” Davida said, horrified by the rough way he handled himself.

Uriah gave a short burst of quiet laughter. “Bless you, I won’t. And I must go quickly, if I’m to accomplish this in haste.”

Davida batted his hand away, sure he was going to do himself an injury. “Let me,” she insisted, taking the strange thing delicately in her palm. “You said I should manage it quicker, anyhow. And see?” she said with a trace of smugness. “Look how it likes me best.” Indeed, it stretched like a contented, sunning cat in her delicate hold.

“I won’t argue with you, Miss Copperfield,” Uriah breathed. “For there must be two parties to a quarrel, and I won’t be one.”

“There. Didn’t I say you were doing it much too hard? Poor thing.” Davida got a feeling for its texture. It was soft as a silk dress, and very firm beneath, as though it were made of different stuff within. It was as long and as pale as he was. “Poor, poor thing,” she murmured again, petting the organ and then drawing it back and forth as he had, but firmer and more slowly.

Uriah made a strange, choking sound, bringing his fist to his mouth and biting his knuckles as Davida pumped him. “It’s moist here at the tip,” she said, dabbing her fingers in the substance, perplexed. “Doesn’t that mean you’ve achieved your peak?”

Uriah shook his head, popping his knuckles (gnawed to an angry red) out of his mouth. “No, but nearly. I’ll need your hand back as it was, and stay with me.”

At first Davida ignored him, taking his poor abused hand to her lips. “This too,” she murmured, kissing the knuckles (still wet from his mouth, and cold, as his hands always were). He shuddered, and then she began to work him again, with the steady rise-and-fall wrist action with which she churned butter when staying with her Aunt, who kept a cow and few servants. Uriah seemed to appreciate the technique, and almost hesitantly pushed the fingers she’d kissed, which still rested on her lips, into her mouth. She supposed he must want her to suck them, for some reason or other. When she did so, even as she pumped his organ, Uriah made a low, fragile noise. It must be nice then, mustn’t it? Or at least he liked the feeling of it.

Uriah began almost to peak, and in her surprise Davida halted the motion of her hand. “Don’t stop,” he pleaded, and Davida worked him more fiercely for having forgotten her charge, giving his fingers another hard suck. “Fuck,” he breathed, saying it once more even as she thought to chastise him for employing such language in front of a lady. “Fuck, darling, please.” He whined and begged her to let him come, and if all his false obsequiousness had ever disturbed Davida, this wild submission to her, which seemed perfectly and wholly true, struck her as more obscene still. The stuff splattered grandly on her hand, while he bent as if he’d snap and shook as if he’d break. Eventually he whimpered a request that she stop, and Davida, popping his fingers out of her mouth with an audible smack, took one of his handkerchiefs from his coat pocket in rather a forward fashion and used it to mop up her sticky hand, offering him another.

Uriah made himself presentable with a rapidity that seemed at odds with his lengthy, shattering release. His movements were still a trifle irregular, however. The hand he used to gesture at the lock wobbled a little. Davida knew that if any member of the household should happen to come and try the door, the two of them could scuttle back to their accustomed places and, after an appropriate interval of faux-confusion and standing to let Agnes or what have you in, could affect some bewilderment at this queer old trick of the house’s (for it had many), and never for an instant be suspected. Still, what she was doing felt illicit (this was not the sort of decision dear Agnes would approve of), dangerous and exciting: not adjectives she normally associated with her father’s clerk. True, Uriah had always exercised a gothic sort of appeal over her, even as she’d been almost viscerally taken aback by his at times fixed attention on her, his gaunt features and his engrossing, disturbing, changeable eyes. Davida had loosely associated this mixture of feelings with her French novels: their depictions of unwholesome longings sometimes put her in mind of the uncomfortable emotions Uriah created in her.

Feeling a drop in her stomach (she knew this course was unwise, and if not unchaste then at least imprudent), Davida steeled herself and turned the bolt. She felt Uriah’s heat and presence at her back her as she did it. She still gasped, though, when, from behind her, he slid his hands over her stomach. She looked down at them lacing over her dress, like whalebones in an external corset—and like a corset they suddenly clenched tight. Only for an instant, and then he relaxed the pressure. It was as though he’d wanted, in some momentary impulse of lust or fondness or possession, to encircle and to squeeze her. His hands fanned out over her hips, and his lips (easily, for he was so much taller than her) aligned with her ear so that he could mutter into it, “I’m ever so obliged to you, Miss Copperfield. I’ve never been half so satisfied with my own efforts. I don’t mind confiding that to you! Perhaps if you’d brace your hands on the door? Oh _thank you_ , Miss Copperfield, you really are too kind.” (She was a little afraid she was being.)

He kissed the back of her neck, making her shiver, and drew her dress and her uppermost petticoats up gingerly. Davida preferred more natural, comfortable styles, without elaborate hoops. “Hold that, would you,” he instructed her briskly, and Davida gathered the weighty load of fabric under her arm.

“I won’t touch you,” he promised, and she nodded. He pressed his hand against her though her thin linen chemise, finding her trembling. Davida closed her eyes against embarrassment. But he stroked her lightly, as if wonderingly. The fabric was damp in his hand, and his touch felt more immediate for it. “My,” he breathed. “But you are so _very_ wet.”

Davida resented his knowing it. For if her novel had affected her, then his toying with her breasts had worsened the situation, and his coming in her hand had given her rush in its own right. She gave a sharp gasp when he pressed his fingers hard against her through the fabric, which was soaked through where he rubbed it against her.

“Gently,” she begged, though he hadn’t hurt her— she was simply afraid that it _might_ hurt.

“Of course,” he agreed, nearly crooning it into her ear. “Won’t you show me how you like it, dearest? How do you use your pretty little fingers, when you’re on your own?”

Davida swallowed, wanting to deny it. “I—”

“Oh but we’re past such polite artifices, ain’t we? Those coy denials—no, we haven’t any use for ‘em, between such friends as we are, and they simply won’t do. Besides, I long to hear all about it,” he assured her, sounding for all the world enthused. “For you see, I’ve never done this before, myself, even as you hadn’t ever performed such an operation on a person of my sex! And you know,” he seemed to stroke his face against her hair, breathing in deeply, “I should like to hear about it for its own sake, for I find I can scarcely imagine a lovelier picture.”

The skirts safely pinned by her elbow, he guided Davida’s hand down, fingers cold against her own (but warming all the while, as they stole a little of her flushed heat). She felt a lump in her throat, too thick to speak past. “Here?” he asked, running her fingertips along the slit of her cunt through the malleable fabric.

Davida shook her head, feeling herself able to give some answer to such a direct question as that. “No, no you’d think, and it is lovely, but mostly I—” her hand drifted up, and she squeezed. She couldn’t _say_ it, but she might show him, mightn’t she?

“That’s where you’d like it, is it?” He asked, lacing his own fingers through hers and rubbing harder than she had done, but not too hard—making her bite her lip. She nodded. The position was an awkward one, but he managed the contortion quite naturally, as he did all the disjointed attitudes he customarily took up. Davida fleetingly thought that perhaps an easier arrangement of their parts would have suited him _less_ well.

He pinned her hand there, holding it in his while he rubbed her, catching the sensitive peak of flesh with his thumb and grinding into it—first lightly, then hander and harder as Davida crumpled against her forearm, braced against the door. She practically sobbed into the wood, and he made soothing noises but didn’t leave off pressing and petting and sliding his fingers against the lips of her cunt through the cloth. She came for him and nearly buckled, though he caught her up against him and supported her, burying his face in her hair once more. He released her cunt only reluctantly, having seemed to derive some satisfaction from holding it after they’d finished.

As Davida raised her arm and let her skirts drop thickly, she noticed something. “You are, it seems, once more provided with a weapon.”

Uriah acknowledged this with a cough. “In my defence, it has been some years since it was quite so quick to rise to the occasion. Be that as it may, I’ve no intention of using it against you. I’d _like_ to, you know, but I won’t do a thing you don’t want done. Don’t pay it any mind—either it goes away of its own accord, or one takes care of it discretely.” 

Feeling rather overwhelmed by the hour’s events, Davida awkwardly excused herself, claiming she was tired. Perhaps she was, too—Uriah flattered himself that she looked quite wrung out by their efforts. She had the goodness to thank him formally, and Uriah, with an effort, did not laugh at her for it.

In her absence, Uriah wondered whether she was pacing in her room, as he had sometimes seen her do when thinking. Perhaps she was, on account of being racked by remorse. Or it might be that Miss Copperfield (his Davida) instead slept soundly, on account of having been well and truly fucked, for all he hadn’t had his cock in her. Possibly her mouth moved softly in slumber, as if around the remembered shape of his fingers. Now there was a picture he wanted to store up and to think on in a lonely hour.

He packed up his overflowing blue satchel of work papers and walked home as soon as he was able to, not having wished to touch himself for relief. For a day at least, let the last hand that had touched him be her small, soft one—her pretty little hand, which he’d then pressed against her equally dainty and exquisite quim, entangling her fingers with his own.

***

Davida Copperfield had never thought it would be this difficult to successfully avoid Uriah Heep. How could she have done? The man was tall and hardly ordinary-looking, so it ought to have been the easiest thing in the world to see him coming and to steer clear of him. It wasn’t. Suddenly the man was everywhere. As she had as a girl, Davida fancied she saw his face on one of the beam-ends outside her bedroom window, looking at her sideways. There again, she found the man himself, in the very-little-flesh, extravagantly enjoying his breakfast in the window of the house he shared with his mother, which she passed while she was walking to school. He’d given her a jaunty little wave as she’d gone along, and she’d been inattentive in her French lessons wondering whether that had been mockery. He was in every other street she turned down, passing her with a tip of his hat, and of course he was all over her father’s house. There was always some perfectly appropriate report he had to give Mr Wickfield when she was sitting up with her father—some question about the domestic accounts to refer to her mother while Davida was by. He didn’t look on her more than usual during these exchanges, as she’d half worried he might, possibly without even meaning to do it. Less, in fact—as though Uriah too were conscious of the risk that a too-speaking look might pass between them and somehow give them away, and he were over-compensating to ward off that danger. He spoke to her markedly less during these meetings as well, perhaps on this account. The difference was so pronounced, however, that her mother asked if they’d had a falling out.

“You were always a favourite of his, you know,” Mrs Wickfield remarked in her easy way. “In the normal way of things, he never can come in here on any pretext without some word for you. Do be kind to him, Davida, for all he is a little awkward. When I told you to address him more formally, I didn’t mean that you ought to be cold, or to resent what may be uncongenial to you in him (as I think you have a general disposition to do). I pray you’ve not been doing so on my account! For he _is_ just a boy, and hasn’t many friends besides you.”

Davida elected not to inform her mother of how excessively civil she’d recently endeavoured to be to Mr Heep. Davida might have suspected Uriah of having been disgusted with her wantonness. (Though if he were, she didn’t fear that he’d say anything to anybody. Uriah was too calculating for that. Such a tale would neither be believed, nor do him a great deal of credit if it were known.) She had, however, some slight evidence to the contrary. When they’d passed one another in the corridor, three days after the event (in broad daylight and by chance—and Uriah knew better than to take this opportunity to have a private conversation with her before the day maid was gone home and the family abed), he’d brushed her hand, pressing it for an instant against his chill one. It had made Davida start and colour, remembering the last circumstances under which they’d held hands thus. But it had been over in an instant. He’d walked on, and so had she.

After a week and a half of avoidance on her part, he’d grown a little bolder. One evening, Davida left her father’s library only to nearly run into Uriah.

“Oh goodness, are you all right Miss Copperfield?” he’d asked, with the full measure of his most irritating civilities, tutting extravangtly over this mischance. “Why haven’t you come to see me?” he’d then asked in a low voice and a completely altered tone. “I do _hope_ I haven’t damaged your dress!” he’d concluded, snapping back to the original.

“ _No_ ,” she’d said sharply, “thank you, I am perfectly all right. _As you see_.”

“Uriah, is that you?” Mr Wickfield had called, and with a blatant roll of his eyes to which only she bore witness (Davida had marvelled at the cheek of it), Uriah had offered up a particularly lugubrious “coming, sir!” (was he _mocking_ papa?) and departed. He’d only spared a final, smouldering glare for Davida before pushing open the door to her father’s office with an unnecessary dramatic flourish, as though he were making a grand entrance on the stage. He slipped through into the library with an over-polished, “ _yes_ , sir?”, which had been too bright by half.

Davida had, of course, not come to see Mr Heep because she’d no idea what the devil had possessed her the last time she’d been alone in his company. Even this business of being alone in his company in the first place was a dubious one. Why ever did this household keep such early hours? _Why_ had no one stopped her? Why had it been allowed? Her kind friends and relations had trusted her too much, and Davida had once or twice felt hot tears in her eyes at the idea of having disappointed them all. For her own part, Davida didn’t like knowing herself to be young, weak and foolish, and at the mercy of her own impulses. She knew that Agnes, in her innate goodness, would never have made such a mistake as she had done. Davida had pushed the boundaries of her otherwise spotless chastity and had, if not lost it, at least temporarily misplaced it—along with her good sense. At least she _hoped_ she had some native degree of that admirable quality (without being able, she was forced to admit, to call to mind a great deal of evidence to that effect just now).

Thus Davida was deeply embarrassed, afraid of Uriah’s reaction (would he lord it over her?), and even a little afraid that he (or, truth be told, even _she_ ) might wish the mistake made over again, if they were alone with one another. For considered solely as a bodily phenomenon, it had been—well. As far as that went, it had almost hurt for being so wonderful. She ached even remembering it—though she didn’t let herself attend to the sensation in the old manner, because to Davida’s thinking, all the trouble had come of _that_ unwise activity in the first place. (Though even believing as much, she recognized that her current abstention from such gratifications was souring her mood. She’d actually snapped at Peggotty once or twice, and Lord knew no woman on the Earth deserved a harsh word from her less than that honest creature!)

Then there was Uriah himself, and _he_ was no slight problem. Davida had no idea whether she liked Uriah immensely or despised him, and she didn’t think it possible to get on with both at once. She certainly didn’t _trust_ him. One should, as Agnes had reminded her during a dispute between them about some of her friends, seek to avoid company that drew you into unchristian behaviour. Uriah certainly counted as that.

Davida was not greatly surprised when the man himself paid her a call in her chamber. She supposed some sliver of light must be visible from the outside, around her shut door in the hall or her closed curtains in the street—or that he’d gambled on her schedule being somewhat consistent, despite recent upheavals, and suspected she’d been cooped up here in order that they might not meet. He slipped in very quietly and laid a finger to his lips, reminding her that loud protests might disturb her family. Their sleeping chambers were not hard by, the old house having seven bedrooms (only five of which saw any use at present, save for when there were guests), spread higgledy-piggledy. But a shouting match would nonetheless raise them.

“I know you can’t have thought it _that_ bad,” Uriah said in a mercifully low voice as he locked the door behind him.

“What in heaven’s name,” Davida said in equally well-judged tones, “do you imagine you are doing in a lady’s bed chamber? At _night?_ ”

“That’s leverage, ain’t it?” Uriah shrugged. “This way, you can feel quite comfortable! For if I do anything you don’t like, you can easily summon help, and have me thrown into prison for the vile crimes I must have come to perpetrate—for I know _I’d_ look quite in the wrong. Only you didn’t leave me any other option, did you? Still, it’d be your word against mine, Miss Copperfield, and who’d believe me?”

“My choices,” Davida asked, horrified, “are either to permit any importunities you propose, or seeing you in prison, disgraced?”

Uriah snorted. “Come to that you could ask me to leave. You ‘aven’t.”

“Well,” Davida said sternly, “I ought to.”

“Ah, but you still ‘aven’t,” Uriah observed. Davida thought seriously about throwing the book she’d been reading at him.

“I quite understand that you might be a trifle concerned about what occurred between us,” Uriah said, taking a seat on the corner of her bed (and with it a vast liberty). “That’s only natural.” He rubbed his chin with his hand in a meditative fashion. Davida thought, as she always did, that perhaps he wanted to grow a beard, but had the good sense to know precisely how ill it would suit him. He seemed to her always to be lamenting this sad chance of fate, and playing his long chin like a stringless violin on account of it. “But don’t take against me for it, even if you don’t think you’d like to try the thing again and see if I can’t improve on it.”

Davida felt rather guilty at that. “There was nothing amiss in that regard!” she offered. “Really, you’ve very little room for improvement, as far as I can tell. My experience is somewhat limited, I must admit, but I’d nothing to complain of, and I’m sorry if I seemed ungrateful.”

Uriah seemed to preen at that. A certain defensive flintiness left his expression, and Davida wondered if he’d become, in her absence, honestly worried that he’d made a hash of matters and suspected that she might be avoiding him on that account. “How excessively kind of you,” he said, with a good deal of smugness. “Really, though I am an ‘umble man, I couldn’t have hoped for praise that would have pleased me better! Why then, given that you didn’t find it unsatisfactory, and provided that we are careful to preserve your virginity proper for your future husband’s exclusive use,” here Uriah’s expression took on sharp edges, though he continued along blithe enough, “I don’t see why we oughtn’t to keep doing it.”

“Don’t you?” Davida snorted. “There are a hundred reasons.” Though these seemed to recede in the face of his insinuations. She snatched at the nearest. “How am I to trust that you would or even could execute such a program, for one?”

Uriah tutted. “Now that ain’t fair, Miss Copperfield. Not fair in the slightest! For one thing, didn’t I keep my word on the previous occasion on that very point? For another, I’m a patient man. Where another man might resent such restraints, I bear ‘em well enough, for my part. One must get used to such limits, when one is as ‘umble as I am.” He extended a hand to cup her small foot through the covers, stroking his thumb across the protruding ball of her tibia meditatively.

“At least let me kiss you,” he said, coaxing—making her feel the reasonableness of his request. “We never did, that other time, and I’d so like to have done it, just the once. It is a hard thing for a man my age, never to have once kissed anyone.”

Davida thought that wasn’t much to ask (though Uriah was only twenty-one, and she hardly considered him Methuselah), and thought that she’d quite like to have exchanged a kiss herself, and to have that accomplishment added to her life’s account. She still hesitated, because all this ran much against her proposed ‘tell Uriah to let me alone’ scheme of action. Uriah seemed to read her indecision.

“You can stop anything you don’t like with a word,” he reminded her. “Just a little word in my ear would do it. And if that _don’t_ do it, why, I can be thrown from here to perdition at a breath from you, with no risk at all to your reputation. I came in here and you protested—nothing could be simpler.” He crawled up towards Davida, who sat up in bed against the cushions as if enthroned. Davida didn’t move to resist him, but neither did he move to claim her mouth. “Do say yes,” he murmured, watching her mouth as he asked for it.

Davida swallowed, and his eyes followed the bob of her throat almost hungrily. “All right,” she said quietly, and Uriah closed his eyes and gratefully bent to press his lips to hers.

Davida didn’t know what to expect from a kiss of this nature. She thought that whatever ones’ expectations were, however, Uriah’s attempt was probably not within their bounds. At first he was too desperate to be at all good. The reverence of his initial approach was consumed by his hunger. He seized her shoulders and smashed their mouths together, and she thought, ‘I’ve no idea what this is supposed to feel like, but surely this cannot be correct.’

Concentrating, Davida set herself to doing the thing right. She caught his lapels so he’d know she wasn’t going anywhere, whispering that she’d like to try something almost against his lips. He held still for her as she began her experiment. She slid her mouth gently against his, their lips gliding warm and wet against one another’s. She did it tentatively, testing the thing, and he copied her movements. Quick. He always was. And watchful—Uriah was always watching people. She pushed her tongue against his mouth, having seen that done once or twice by engaged couples (she knew she ought to have looked away, but she’d been curious). Seemingly bewildered but game, Uriah opened for her. It only took a few slides of her tongue against his for him to decide that this was certainly something he wanted to do, and to push his tongue forcefully into her mouth (forcefully, rather than wildly, as he had done before). Now his fierceness, banked but trembling through him, seemed perfectly matched to his methods and to the act. Davida thought for a moment that it was strange that one should need to learn how to express something as instinctual as passion—but then no, that was what one did with words, wasn’t it? A scream wasn’t a poem of anguish, the guttural noises of copulation weren’t a love sonnet.

Uriah gently bit her thick lower lip, clearly testing the idea out, and Davida shuddered warm breath into his mouth. She didn’t protest when he brought his hands back to her breasts. Through her thin nightdress she could feel him more keenly than she had done on their last attempt, and she shivered at the combination of this touch and the series of kisses progressing from the corner of her mouth down the side of her neck. That was, it seemed, particularly sensitive terrain.

“Could I kiss you here?” He murmured dropping his hand and fondling the round, hard protrusion of her patella bone once more.

“Hm,” she asked, dazed.  “Oh—if you like?” Though she didn’t quite know why he wanted it.

Uriah folded his overly-long limbs in some improbable way and pushed himself down. He kissed her ankle, and then he performed the operation on her calf, slowly inching up Davida’s nightdress as he went. Davida felt galvanized where he touched her, lit up by the light drag of his fingertips, here, there and everywhere, and by the press of his mouth. When he reached Davida’s knees, he glanced up at her.

Davida bit her lip and released it again. “You’ll only kiss,” she tried to remind him, as sternly as she could manage.

He licked his lips. She wondered whether that was done voluntarily or no. “Exactly so.”

With some misgiving, Davida nodded, and she let him prise her knees apart, kissing his way up her inner thighs.

He gave a breathless huff of laughter, and she began to worry that she’d somehow or other managed to embarrass herself. “What is it?” she asked tightly.

“Why, only that it’s so soft here!” he marvelled, running his fingers along the insides of her thighs in a way that made Davida want to squirm, the chill of them causing her to shiver slightly. “You’re soft pretty near everywhere, but this is softer yet.”

Hesitantly, Davida patted his short-shorn hair, finding the burr of it pleasant under her fingers—like petting a cat. She stroked it, but her hand stilled when his kiss landed at the junction of her thigh and pelvis.

“I don’t think,” she began, cutting herself off when he petted the tight curls above her sex just as she’d petted his hair. Davida cleared her throat and started up again. “You can’t mean to do it.”

Urian propped himself on his elbows, glancing up at her even as he slid his left hand down the top of her thigh, hitching up her night dress in the process—the thing had done nothing but retreat this evening, like Napoleon’s army after sacking Moscow. “Can’t I, though? It’s just a kiss. That’s a little enough thing, ain’t it?” He looked back at the flesh he’d uncovered, and if he hadn’t known it was imperative that he keep quiet, she thought he would have whistled.

Slowly, giving her all the time in the world to object, he slipped back down and brought his lips to hers, in a manner of speaking. It felt very queer, the first time—so strange that she didn’t know how to process it. For he was just kissing her: chastely, his tongue being as yet uninvolved in the proceedings. He explored the area, dropping light kisses along her entrance and up against the spot she’d guided him to the previous night. Light racing sensations coalesced into something definite then, and Davida jerked at the throb and twitch of response in her.

“Well remembered,” she murmured.

“Thank you,” he returned with some satisfaction, and she shuddered at the hot breath against her sensitized skin. “Why this is softer still. I thought it might be. Now let me see if I haven’t got an idea.”

He kissed again the spot Davida found particularly efficacious—only this time, he flicked his tongue against it in the easy slide he’d used against her own. Davida made a started, tight sound. He tried it again, and she issued forth a hard breath, struggling against her compulsion to make a noise.

“Oh goodness, do you like that?” he asked insufferably, with an overweening politeness she knew to be sarcastic. Davida found herself frantically pushing him down using what little grip she could get on his short hair to make him do it again. He chuckled against her, and she closed her eyes and thought that just now, she liked him immensely.

“Careful now, or you’ll wake the whole house,” he chastised, though he seemed strangely delighted by this terrible prospect.

Davida looked frantically about her and grabbed her pillow. Lying down, she shoved the corner of it in her mouth and flapped a hand at him, gesturing for him to go on. Uriah’s expression grew strangely mazed at this development. He caught her hand (his fingers were growing warmer, as he touched her and drew on her warmth), brought it to his mouth for a kiss, dropped it, and then turned himself seriously to his business. He clenched his long hands around her hips and went about the thing with what she felt to be an obscene, gratuitous degree of enthusiasm, and no little vigour. Davida was grateful for the expedient of the feather pillow, strange as it was to have the thing clenched between her teeth, with her eyes screwed firmly shut and her hands pressing his head down and fluttering between his shoulders and the bedclothes, which she twisted in her small fists. She made so many pathetic whimpers that without the pillow to catch them, Agnes, soundly as she slept, might have woken thinking her sister in a nightmare or the grip of a fever. Davida supposed that Agnes might not have had it entirely wrong if she had done.

Despite these ample distractions, Davida was nonetheless still taken aback when she felt something trace the periphery of her cunt. She knew that given his position it could hardly be Uriah’s organ, treacherously positioned for conquest. Still, the sensation alarmed her. She spat out the pillow and whispered Uriah’s name in a tone of question. He raised his head.

“Shh,” he soothed, stroking her thigh with his free hand as though to gentle her. “It’s only a fingertip, and outside you still. I expect it feels a little different, seeing as it’s not your own. You slide a finger or two in here while seeing to yourself, I imagine? I’m sure you must, from time to time.”

Reluctantly, once more feeling deeply embarrassed (not least by the way he wet his lips while saying it), Davida grudgingly admitted that yes, she’d done that. 

“I thought you must have done,” Uriah said, nodding enthusiastically. “Mine are only a little bigger around than your own, you see—still quite thin! I wonder if you’d let me do it for you? Mind, I’d start with just the one, and only go on if you liked it. You’re awfully wet—I think it’d work a treat. And it’s only,” he reminded her, “what you do on occasion yourself, you know.”

Davida had sometimes found she needed that expedient to reach her conclusion. And she imagined it’d feel—well, she _liked t_ hat, and when Uriah did a thing it felt stranger and better than when she did it herself. In fact a queer, insistent sort of hunger rose in her at the thought.

“You can finger me, if you like,” Davida said, trying to sound like an adult about the matter, and not as though she were pulsing with want.

Uriah kissed her again, hard, giving her breast a firm squeeze, then returned to lapping at her. After a moment, he pushed the tip of his finger in. This slow penetration seemed to go on forever—such long fingers! (Though Davida had seen his organ, and knew it to be built along the same lines, and, if anything, worse in this regard.) When he’d gone in as deeply as he could, he dragged himself out again. The fullness was a blessing, but the unpredictable drag was better. Davida had to reclaim her pillow as he slid himself into and out of her. At first he went about it with a testing sort of deliberateness, but then he went ever faster, and Davida found that movement better than all.

He held her down with a hand splayed across her stomach when she started to thrash more than was convenient, and he kept going through her peak, though he must have felt her trembling and clenching around his finger. She had to smack his shoulder with the heel of her hand to get him to stop, for she found it hurt for him to touch her when she was finished.

She felt a flicker of disgust (and, spent as she was, a simultaneous clench of arousal) when she watched him lick his finger clean after, though she supposed it was no different than what he’d just done. (Had it really been just _one_ finger, that had felt so thick within her? It seemed so, but she could scarcely credit it.) Davida was exhausted. She could hardly move as he fussed her, stroking his hand through her unbound hair (she didn’t put it in papers at night, on account of its curling naturally) and arranging her nightgown in a better order. Vigour returned to her limbs and order to her thoughts but slowly, and when they did she noticed a curious bulge in Uriah’s trousers. An instant’s thought answered the question of what troubled him, and she blushed, even having spent the last half hour occupied as she had been. On the other hand, she also was slightly embarrassed not to have understood the problem immediately. (And there again, she was almost a little proud at having occasioned such a physical alteration in another, for it seemed the need of her had done this to him.)

Slowly, Davida pushed herself up. She reached for his trouser flies with some confidence, attempting to be business-like about this. Uriah adjusted himself and reclined against the wall her bed was pushed against, letting her feel her way and hissing breath when she resumed the movement which had proven so efficacious during their last attempt.

With a long finger under her chin, he drew her into a kiss. She thought, with surprise and repulsion, that his mouth tasted different now, and that she knew the reason why. When they broke off he whispered into the narrow gap between them, “won’t you kiss me too, Miss Copperfield?”

Their late activity left her in little doubt as to his meaning, for he wasn’t asking for the sort of kiss he’d just been given. Davida felt a little panicked and unsure at this proposal. She also felt a certain grotesque draw to the idea—to gently kissing the tip and sides of that long, pale column, which, when she handled it, soon flushed as angry and red as its originator.

“Don’t you find this satisfactory?” Davida asked, buying herself time to think.

“Oh immeasurably,” Uriah assured her, flattering and coaxing in a lower tone than she was accustomed to from him. “Why it’s heaven! Inconceivably fine! But your mouth might be better still, and I should so like to find out.” He stroked her cheek, and for once, his hands were positively warm (though again, with her own borrowed heat). “Shouldn’t you like to kiss me? Aren’t afraid, are you?” He gave Davida the sort of patronizing look calculated to incense her. “You needn’t do a thing, you know,” he ground in, “for all I did it for you, if you’re _afraid_. Why I wouldn’t have you do it for the world, under such conditions as that!”

“I am not much given to that sort of start,” Davida said coolly. She considered that he was playing upon her weaknesses of character, which were well known to him, but further considered her odd, gradual increase of interest in the act as she became more comfortable with the idea. Indeed, even as she bent down to gently touch her lips to his member, she thought distinctly, ‘why, how strange! I want very much to do this.’

He shook so at the touch of her lips and made such awkward spontaneous cries that she broke off from dropping small kisses up and down the shaft to suggest, quite civilly, that he too make use of her pillow, if he couldn’t keep himself under control. After all, being caught would do him no good. At this, Uriah opened his shut eyes to smite Davida with a glare such as she’d never before seen him level at anyone—pure fire, searing right through his layers of obsequiousness. With a great jerk, as though expressive of a strong effort of will, Uriah brought his body under an almost frightening degree of rigid control. Davida wondered whether she ought to continue, but an iron hand wrenching through her curls and tugging her down brought Davida to order. She glared up at him, and he shivered and bit his lip and made not the slightest sound as, holding him with her glare, she wrapped her hand around the base of his manhood and tongued the top.

After a short while Davida became engrossed in the act itself, and it occurred to her that she might be able to get the whole head of the thing into her mouth. When she did it, Uriah broke a fraction of an inch—just enough to whisper ‘more’ and to pat at her hair in a desperate, beseeching fashion. Flattered, Davida acceded to his request, and when he began to shake in her hands she drew her head back but continued to steadily work his member. Seized by an impulse, Davida kissed him as he peaked. He moaned gratefully into her mouth—the sound caught there, along with whatever words he chose to say.

Uriah straightened himself up in the aftermath, running his fingers over the buttons of his coat and adjusting his cravat. He didn’t look like a man who’d just assiduously mopped his spending off her bedspread with another of his handkerchiefs and a little water from the jug on her nightstand. He’d never be handsome, but there was something about him, contained like this, that drew her. She didn’t know whether she longed to dishevel his over-neatness, which seemed to her such a grotesque misrepresentation of his sprawling, mad, feverish core, or whether she wanted him—just as he was, buttoned ankle to shin—to debauch himself richly with her, making each proper button a liar. Uriah cast a glance at her, obviously asking whether he was presentable. Davida nodded, and he smiled at her (as near as he got to a grin, at any rate).

“Now don’t make me come and fetch you again,” he said, his voice taking on a shade of the cajoling servility she was coming to associate with his more public persona. He had a servant’s eagerness to please here, true, but he paired it with a more sinister confidence she couldn’t reconcile with his cringing. When he’d fawned and patted her hair after she’d come and called her very dear, Davida had thought it exactly similar in form to his ordinary flattery and yet entirely different in its intention, and thus in its feeling. He’d _meant_ it then, which made her all the surer that usually, he didn’t. So was he asking her now, or threatening to come pay her another such visit if she didn’t, confident that he could talk her into allowing him such liberties again?

She did believe he’d keep to the terms of their agreement. After all, as he’d made clear, he had plenty of reasons not to tamper with her virginity, whereas at present they both benefited from exchanges such as these. Davida still had some qualms, but it was difficult to feel their force in the lingering peaceful haze her coming had thrown over her.

“We needn’t do it, if you don’t like it—though I got rather a different impression, Miss Copperfield, bless my soul I did.” Uriah filled the space in which she’d failed to respond with words, jolting Davida out of her considerations. Davida wondered if he thought she was going to tell him no, and was trying to head it off. “Only I won’t be shunned for it—I won’t lose your friendship over this, when I have never made any secret of quite esteeming you, and when it was as much your choice as mine.” The words ought to have been pleasant, but they were cagey and bitter and over-sweet, all at once. Was even a word of it real? Or was it perhaps more real than she was comfortable with? God alone knew whether Uriah really liked _her_. Did she wish him to? What would it mean, if she did?

“I know it was,” Davida conceded. “And I don’t object to doing it again, on expressly these terms, if you are amiable.”

“Aren’t I always?” Uriah snapped, his voice going higher and more brittle without warning. “Well,” Uriah said, his tone regaining its polite register seemingly without effort, “thank you ever so much for a most entertaining evening, Miss Copperfield. I do hope I haven’t put you out. I wonder if you might be so good as to—?” He gestured at the door, and Davida slipped past him. She looked out into the hallway and, finding it clear, waved Uriah on. He passed out without a backward glance, walking so purposefully and in such an ordinary fashion that Davida herself almost found it difficult to believe where he’d been and what he’d been about. She was forced, in spite of herself, to admire his nerve.

She had plenty of occasion to admire it over the coming months. He wasn’t a captain in a sea-faring adventure story by a long shot, but in his own way he was as daring as any of them. Once, when they were in his office, making an unwisely early start, Peggotty came through the hall calling for Davida. The two of them froze, realizing how difficult it would be to make themselves presentable in time—without much warning, Peggotty was, judging by the sound of her voice, very near. They hadn’t heard her coming, having been engrossed in other activities. (Uriah had gotten very good at kissing, since he’d learned how.)

“Did you lock the door?” he mouthed at her soundlessly.

Davida thought she had, and thus she nodded, but doubt (that was doubtless legible to him) crept into her wide, frightened eyes. True, it was her custom, but a thing like that might be easily forgotten once, and once would prove enough. _Had she done it this time?_

Uriah set his jaw, and his eyes looked furious—not, she thought, with her, but rather with any interloper. He was clearly prepared to brazen this out. The handle turned—and stuck. Peggotty clucked. “Locked up for the night,” that worthy woman muttered to herself. “And Davida must be abed for the evening. Well, it’s nothing that won’t keep.”

Peggotty walked away, and Uriah began to laugh with relief, perfectly soundlessly, clutching Davida and bending his head to press his lips against her temple.

Davida exhaled slowly, risking a shaky smile. “We shall have to—”

“Be more prudent,” Uriah muttered back, nodding. “A little more patient. I was thinking exactly that. But at present—” Seemingly undaunted by their near-escape, he resumed his earlier activity with, if anything, fresh enthusiasm. He cheerfully urged her up on the very desk he did his work at and knelt on the floor to use his tongue on her: a posture his tallness made convenient, he said, though she’d an odd suspicion that he liked, for reasons of his own, to thus misuse the desk at which he spent his days.

This wasn’t their only arrangement, but it was one of his favourites. He expressed several such preferences and quirks in these interludes. He seemed to love the scent of every bit of her, and to feel compelled to gulp it into himself. He’d asked if anyone ever saw her breasts, any of the maids or what have you, and when she’d given him a queer look and said no, he’d asked to, and then sucked them so fiercely as to leave marks (and to leave her trembling). Afterwards it looked as though she had a rash of some sort. She told him not to leave evidence (for what if she were run over by a carriage in the street, and a doctor sent for?), and he apologized profusely and said it shouldn’t happen again (underneath those cloying self-remonstrations at having inconvenienced her thus, Davida had detected a sort of sarcasm, fuelled by a triumphant satisfaction that was confusingly intertwined with a strain of wild anger: Uriah was at times fathoms too deep for Davida to make out). He seemed also to take particular delight in disarranging and subsequently fixing her hair—he’d gotten as nimble with it as a lady’s maid, and Davida was fairly confident that they’d never be detected on that score. In general they were careful. They aired the room habitually, and washed as if they’d murdered Duncan and now repented of it.

They didn’t meet every evening, but for a little over two months they did convene a few times a week, when the activities of the rest of the household made doing so convenient. Sparks of conscience rose up in Davida against their activities, and Uriah worked her around in a hundred ways. After a while he seemed to enjoy the process of it: he came up with an array of arguments, some so ridiculous she laughed at him and some so cunning she thought they’d hold in court, and told him once again that he was like to be a great lawyer someday. He’d seemed to enjoy the compliment, and said that probably she wouldn’t remember, but that actually, she’d said as much the very day she’d come to live here. “You may not recollect it,” he continued, “but when a person is ‘umble, Mistress Copperfield, a person treasures such things up!” (She wished he wouldn’t use that particular name for her—she’d outgrown the schoolgirl sound of it, and the double-meaning it now took on made her wince.)

“I recollect talking about it,” said she, “perfectly well. I’d wager my memory is just as good as yours, Uriah.”

“Is it now?” he asked with that carved grin on his face, and he put her to the test. ‘You don't remember your own eloquent expressions on such and such an occasion, I am sure.’ (She did.) ‘Oh but what of So-and-so? You have forgot him, I have no doubt.’ (She decidedly hadn’t.) ‘Why, to think that you've not forgot that!’

Annoyed by his pretended inability to recognize her fascilities, which obviously aligned with his own, Davida fell to quizzing _him_. They didn’t do anything at all indecorous that evening, unless bickering over whether Dr. Strong’s door had used to be blue or red before its repainting for a quarter of an hour counted, due to its being extremely petty and childish.

“It doesn’t matter,” Davida said, as she’d avowed no less than three times during the conversation, as occasion had demanded it. “Though I do distinctly recall it _was_ blue, on account of its matching dear Annie’s eyes, and thus also her best frock, which I have seen her in time and again, standing next to that very same door.”

“No no,” Uriah would concede, “a little thing like that can’t matter at all! Though it was certainly as red the post box across the way, I’ll ‘appily agree with anything you choose to say on the point, for an ‘umble person such as myself—”

“Oh _will you stop?_ ”

“Pardon?” he grinned at her. “Stop what, Mistress Copperfield?”

She glared at him so hard she expected and hoped he’d bruise from the look alone. He asked if she wasn’t feeling just a mite sullen this evening, and she said that it was very sad indeed, but one day someone would certainly murder him, if he kept on in his ways.

She still didn’t know whether he cared much for _her_ as opposed to their pleasant occupations. Once, when she’d tried to take him deeply into her throat and had choked a little on him, the sound or thought of it had inflamed him. His grip on her hair had turned cruel, and he’d whispered a shocking imprecation against her. “You never have condescended to me, as much as I could have wished,” he continued. “I know you have never liked me, as I have liked you. But you’ll do this for me, and _want_ it, too.”

Davida got a grip on his wrist and dug her nails in hard, so that his hand spasmed and he released her. He nursed his wrist and looked at her, angry and almost betrayed, as she pulled away from him.

“I am not,” Davida said distinctly, her cheeks on fire with indignation as she struggled even to say the word, which she could never recall using before in her life, “a _slut_ , Heep. I am not. Or if I am, then you are no better, and you have never scrupled at this either. Your sex offers you no superior excuse. I have, I think, done nothing to rightly earn your displeasure, and if I have done, then there are better ways to inform me of the fact. If you aren’t at least decent to me then I see no reason to do this, now or ever again. That is no fit thing to call a lady.”

He’d looked at her, bewildered by rage and confusion, and then seemed to crumple before her. “No,” he said softly, his eyes widening, “no, I am sorry. I am. Please. I’ll be ever so much better—let me show you. You’ll have no cause to complain of me.”

If his savagery had half frightened her a moment ago, now she nearly feared his earnestness. This was an apology that seemed to break his mouth and distort his whole face. It was as though he’d never meant a one of them before (and there had been so very many).

Davida swallowed. “One hopes a gift—between friends, as you put it—will be met with kindness, or with gratitude.”

Uriah nodded, staring at her with a startling intensity, as though he tracked each breath she took and matched his against it, and would stop breathing if ever she did. “I’m grateful,” he said, pulling her back against him very, very gently. “Oh I know I ought to be. And I am—to you, and perhaps to the mother who bore me, and to no one else in the world. I only meant it in passion, and not to hurt you. For I certainly don’t care about any precious public opinions on this point. Isn’t it nice, if it’s intended as praise?” he beseeched her. “I swear I never meant to hurt you.”

There was something terrible in the flickering expressions progressing across his face, and in this tenderness: in the way he stroked her cheek and her hair, and whispered thanks when she tentatively took him in her hand. His tone was something like worshipful.

“Don’t you want to hurt me, sometimes?” She asked quietly, and he trembled all over and shook his head no. “I think you do,” she persisted. For wasn’t it in the cramped position of his fingers, some nights when she assisted him thus? Didn’t it live in the tightness of his eyes?

“Not,” he managed, “not more than—if I’d like to hurt you, then I don’t want you to _be_ hurt, by me or anybody. Least of all by anybody else. How’s that?”

“Incomprehensible,” she answered, “as you often are.”

“That won’t do,” he shook his head, gasping as she squeezed him tightly. “For you must comprehend—how I _am_ grateful to you. Aren’t I decent to you, though? Don’t you feel I am?”

She bit her lip and nodded, because generally he was, and he begged her to say it. When she did, he thanked her, and he peaked thanking and begging her all the while. Davida felt a little shaken, after that encounter: as though she’d lifted back the cover of a box kept in storage and found contents she couldn’t recognize, but knew to be portentous. She slid the box away, for now, but she knew _something_ was in there, and that it wouldn’t stay put forever.

In the weeks preceding the celebration of Davida’s eighteenth birthday, Uriah made a score of cattish comments that were ostensibly general chatter about the dinner that would be given to mark the event. Davida gleaned that Uriah did not expect an invitation, and was irate on this account. Indeed, she was embarrassed to realize that she hadn’t given thought as to whether to extend him one. Uriah was always about the house, but his position was ambiguous. He wasn’t a gentleman, nor was he a servant. It wasn’t entirely a question of class: Peggotty would hardly be excluded from such a party, after all. It was more that Uriah wasn’t the sort of man one invited to a fête.

Davida had thought that he might be wheedling a place in the party out of her, but he’d seemed honestly surprised when, in his very presence, so that her father couldn’t dismiss the idea, she’d said ‘oh, and we must include Mr Heep, mustn’t we, papa?’ Her father had seemed startled, but had agreed, in a slow, grudging voice, that it was quite right to think of him. For his part, Uriah said he’d certainly attend. He hadn’t any other engagement. (He’d seemed to find his own joke amusing, there: Davida could tell by the way his nostrils flared, though before her father he kept his expression perfectly bland.)

Davida watched her father’s curt response with a strange sensation of seeing him through Uriah’s eyes. Her father didn’t much like the clerk he’d ‘rescued’ from the charity school and elevated into his household. There again, Uriah did a vast sum of his work, and made himself agreeable (if in a disagreeable manner that suggested private spite to Davida). What right had Mr Wickfield not to like his drudge, and to show it, where Uriah, dependant as he was for both his mother’s livelihood and his own, never could but through such falsity as he employed? A quick response from him and it was back to the poor house, unarticled. Perhaps now that he was older Uriah might be able to find employment elsewhere if he were thus dismissed, but as a boy he hadn’t had the skills or the means, and he might well have known hunger too intimately to want to risk becoming reacquainted with it.

If her father disliked Uriah but kept him anyway, that gave rise to other conclusions.

“Father,” Davida asked, “would you say Mr Heep is a good lawyer?”

“He isn’t one yet, my child,” Mr Wickfield said, taking down one of the books he perused for his leisure. “Being unarticled.”

“But he does the work of one?” Davida pressed, and Wickfield clucked and said ‘to be sure’.

“And the firm prospers at present, Papa?”

“You needn’t worry about that!” her father said, patting her hand absently. “We are getting along very well indeed. Ask Uriah, if you are interested in the accounts. I confess they tire and bore me, and I hardly recall the state of them.”

Davida was uncomfortable with the picture she was forming of her father’s role in the firm of late. Perhaps Uriah had appropriated too great a degree of control over the business for himself. But then if he had done, had it been in response to Wickfield’s entrusting him with a good deal of the responsibility going (and thus with so much work that Uriah stayed most evenings until the family was abed)? They were not a little firm, precisely—why had they only _one_ clerk? Other offices in Canterbury that did about their volume of trade, as Davida understood it, made use of several. She spoke to Agnes and her mother, sounding them out on the subject, and it worried her until concerns related to the little dinner party temporarily crowded it out.

On the evening of the party, Uriah, via a series of offensively lavish ‘oh I couldn’t possibly’ demurrals, ended up seated next to Davida for the evening, as though he were her intended or something of the sort. Still, having exercised himself thus far he seemed content to settle down and not make much of himself. He watched the company, and was quiet and polite, and judging by the occasional glimmers in his eye Davida had no doubt whatever that he was storing up an eviscerating critique of half the people present, and would present it to her with great relish after the event. When someone said something deliciously awful (the Strongs were present, and with them Annie’s cousin Jack Malden, who Davida detested), he’d rap his fingers against his bony knees under the table as if unable to help himself, because he was simply that overcome with delight. It was deeply irritating. Sensing another such display coming on, Davida seized Uriah’s hand in hers. He allowed it, contenting himself with squeezing her hand when the conversation got to be too much for him. The tablecloth obscured this arrangement from the rest of the company.

Bowing to inevitability, for she was sure he’d manage it somehow if she didn’t (to show his power, or to irritate her, or because he’d like to win and thought that they might, if they were paired up) Davida asked Uriah if he’d be her partner at the charades after. They surprised everyone by being uncannily good: there was no display to which Uriah would not debase himself to secure her understanding, and he flowed like an eel into any position required. They read one another like books, and the company agreed that while it was fitting that Davida had so triumphed on her birthday, the two of them were not to be allowed to match up again.

Davida had drunk perhaps a little more than she ought to have done over the course of the evening in accepting healths, and when the guests were sent off late and her family was securely tucked in bed, she thought to check whether Uriah had actually gone home or had in fact doubled back around to his office.

“I guessed right,” she said cheerfully on finding him there, locking the door behind her by force of habit.

“We wouldn’t have won if you hadn’t a knack for it,” Uriah agreed, hopping off his desk and coming towards her. “For my part, I thought you’d like to finish the day with a sort of present.”

Davida suddenly felt very much inclined. A rush of interest came over her, and she tugged Uriah over to the desk. “Do you think about this during the day?” she asked, rapping the desk to demonstrate her meaning, emboldened by the alcohol and made careless and easy. “Seeing as we’ve made so much use of this poor instrument.”

“What a question,” Uriah said with a hard grin, “and what a thing to call me, really!”

Davida laughed at that and thought oh, he’s a little drunk too. He drank every health I did. Not so much as I am, but then I am smaller. She pulled up her skirts and pressed his hand against her, jerking and wriggling violently when he gave her a caress.

“Why, are we at charades again? I suppose this is your impression of me?” he asked as she writhed, and Davida shook her head and said she could never do him justice. She undid her bodice as she said it, and he watched her breasts spill free. “You are awful forward tonight, ain’t you?” he said, taking a breast in his free hand and weighing it meditatively.

She watched him for a moment, then said, “but you like it, don’t you?”

He darted a glance at her. “Well—” he began, and she cut him off.

“Please,” she said, pressing her chest up into his hand. “Kiss me there.”

Looking a little dazed, he did it, and he breathed harder when she said that was wonderful, Uriah—he was so very deft at that. “And could you finger me?” she asked, twitching in his hands once more. “Make it nice. Make me a birthday present of it. Then let me suck you off, for that’s as good as any game. I am good at it, aren’t I? I do like feeling myself proficient at a thing.”

He dropped into his chair and tugged her onto his bony lap, sliding a finger into her and grinding into her most sensitive point with his thumb. “You’re perfect in it,” he assured her. She twitched on his finger and breathed a request for more, and he slid in a second. “Of course I think on it,” he said, and she recalled this coming up earlier in their conversation with a start. “Every hour. An’ almost as often I think, wouldn’t it be pleasant to fuck dear Miss Copperfield with my cock, rather than with my fingers? I won’t, naturally,” he said in response to Davida’s suddenly stiffening in his grasp, “but I do like to think on it. For it’d start like this, you see—I’d get you to come on my fingers, so that you were nicely relaxed, as you always are afterwards, you know. Then I’d be hard—you know better than anyone that I would be, for don’t I always get so, from attending to you?—and I’d slide myself in, sweet as you like. It’d kill me not to move, but I’d manage it, and I’d touch you like this,” he played his thumb across her sensitized bud, “so you’d grow to love the feel of me in you. And I shouldn’t move until you pleaded with me to, until you said my name and asked it of me as a favour. And then _God_ I would fuck you, and I’d feel how tight you get when you come around my cock and not my knuckles, and you’d scream and it wouldn’t matter who heard, and you’d want me, harder and faster and anything you like, you’d _need_ me to do it. Or you might ask me to stay still, so you could take me at your own pace, sitting in my lap just as you are now. Any way your fancy took you. I _won’t_ , but you know I’d like to.”

“We mustn’t,” she breathed, and he said in a hard voice that he knew.

“But,” his tone shifted, “mightn’t we talk about it a little, Miss Copperfield? For I so enjoy saying it to you, and it looks as though you get slick and tremble from even having me tell you how wildly desperate I am to fuck you.” He shoved an unprecedented third finger into her and moved them together, faster now. “It’d be something like this,” he said. “Now my hands aren’t free just at the moment, so could you be so kind as to cup your breasts for me? There now, that is pretty. Pinch yourself a little.”

Davida coloured. “I—”

“Of course you can,” he soothed her. “You know how I do it, don’t you? Just so. Mm. I bet you’d bite your lip like just that if I fucked you, wouldn’t you Copperfield? But then you’d be noisy for me—oh, I expect you would. And maybe you’d thank me after, for seeing to you so well, because you’re such a good, genteel girl. Try—yes, that’s it,” he said approvingly as she bounced her hips and ground into his bony, unrelenting fingers. “You’re always so quick.”

She relished the resistance of them, and the way he panted into her ear, “perhaps you’d ask me to do it again, and I’d always be willing to oblige you, Copperfield. I certainly should.” He sounded as though he was the one being worked upon.

She came thrashing her head back and forth, and he said “there now, Mistress Copperfield, keep your eyes on me, for I do love to watch you peak. You’re such a queenly thing, you know. You looked so lovely all night, in your best dress, and even though no one else knew it, _I_ knew that you were a little mine. It gave me some comfort to know it.”

She didn’t hear this as well as she might have done, and even a little drunk he was quite aware of and even counting on it—her sharp memory slackened in such moments as this. When she’d recovered, she slipped to the floor before him and tugged at his trousers. He gasped and choked when she encouraged him, just a little, to fuck into her mouth. He kept a white-knuckle grip on the arms of his chair and thrust up delicately, as though restraint were a torture (though Davida didn’t think his keening whimpers were expressive of pain). He cursed for a minute together when she swallowed, interrupting his oaths only with her surname or her Christian name—taking care, it seemed, to make their designated object terribly clear.

Afterwards, she sat with her head against his thigh. He pushed his hand through his hair—what little there was of it—and then he slowly pushed her dishevelled mane back into its elaborate party configuration.

“What do you think of Mr Maldon?” she asked as he worked, and he snorted expressively. She smiled, recognizing the segue into a polite effusion in that gentleman’s part that would actually be such a dagger-sharp vivisection of the man that it would make her feel almost sorry for him.

“Why,” he stopped suddenly, mid-flow, “you don’t _like_ him, do you? For you had better aim higher than that creature.”

She laughed and said she had no thought to marriage at present, and would sooner be Misses Jack Ketch than Misses Jack Maldon.

“Who, madam?” he asked her, seeming to wonder whether some Mr Ketch, new to the neighbourhood, were already making proposals.

“Jack Ketch, the proverbial hangman,” she returned. “The most unlikely person I could think of,”—though Uriah’s own lank, pale face had suggested the allusion quite as a natural sequence. “Suffice it to say, I am never to be engaged to Jack Maldon. (Nor, I hope, is any other woman.) I trust that will content you, for I should doubt my own sanity if I were to alter my opinion on that front.''

“Upon your soul?' said Uriah. She was about indignantly to give her assertion the confirmation he appeared to require when he caught hold of her hand and gave it a squeeze. “No,” he said, “for you’re cleverer than that, ain’t you? Besides, you’ve given your word, so I never should have doubted you. As it is, I'm sure I'll trust you that far, and only too ‘appy. I know you'll excuse the precautions of affection, won't you? For I’ve known you too long and been too much your friend to see you wedded to an idiot, who can hardly muster the energy to eat his dinner.”

Something about this put her in mind of a time when, as a child, she’d stopped at an inn and been done out of more than half her own dinner by a cunning waiter, and had been teased by everyone at the inn for having (they thought) consumed such a meal herself—and she such a little thing, too! She offered up the recollection a little hesitantly, not knowing whether Uriah (who she associated more with sums than with stories) found such things as amusing as she did. But either he found her evocative description of the fiendish waiter and her own bafflement quite funny, or he pretended he did, and afterwards he kissed her and wished her a happy birthday once more before she (with a little more difficulty than usual) ascended the stairs for bed.

His birthday followed hers after a decorous interval of a month (even as it preceded it by a handful of years), and as usual he wasn’t giving any party. He did suggest that his mother would be delighted if Davida would come and take tea with them on the day, but said that he didn’t expect her to keep any such engagement. Midway through a particularly writhing commentary on the humility of the house and its consequent unsuitability for her occupation, even for an hour, Davida put her hand over his mouth. She removed it, though she kept it held up, requesting silence.

“Are you making,” she asked, “such an—you must forgive me—such an awful arse of yourself because you’d rather I _didn’t_ come for some reason or other (and if so, I might like to know what that is), or because you wish I _would?_ Do you do this to guilt me into doing a thing you’re afraid to simply ask of me, not trusting that I’d oblige you, or to put me _off_ doing anything of the kind? Or is it wanting a thing that makes you nervous, and compels you to go on in that fashion?”

He gave her a vile look and sweetly said he didn’t know what she meant, and that it was quite unkind of her to so take against the simple ‘umility of an ‘umble person such as—

Again she put her hand over his mouth. “I can tell when you’re vexed now,” she said. “So well, in fact, that I don’t know how I ever managed not to know it. There isn’t any taking that back. It came with everything else, and you must help me find out what to make of it. Ah ah ah!” she said when he moved to speak. “Just nod _yes_ if you’d like me to come, and _no_ if you’d rather I had to take a bath for the entirety of Friday.”

Glaring hotly at her, after a moment he managed a narrow, grudging, affirmative jerk of his head.

“Your mother’s teacakes it is then,” Davida said with a roll of her eyes, though in fact when the day came she spent her pocket money on dainty almond cakes of a nicer sort than she could have made herself and a bottle of currant wine to augment Mrs Heep’s provisions, and gritted her teeth into a fixed smile at Mrs Heep’s resultant raptures about what a lovely, thoughtful, refined girl she was. Mrs Heep, as ever, made much of her Ury, and if ‘Ury’ appeared to alternately take this in stride and to wish keenly for a swift and sudden death to remove him from the conversation, Davida did him the favour of pretending not to notice.

“Do you want any little thing for your birthday?” she asked as he walked her back to her father’s house.

“Nothing material, just at present,” he said, glancing about him to confirm that the lane was as deserted as he knew it to be, and that the buildings hadn’t moved overnight so as to possibly conceal eaves-droppers, “but it’d satisfy me beyond anything if you’d let me sod you.”

Davida came in an instant to a complete stop. “If what?””

“If you,” he began again, very slowly, with the beginnings of an equally slow grin.

“No no,” she said, “for I find I did hear you after all. I only found believing that I had done a little difficult, that’s all. Why do you even want such a thing as that?”

“I’ve been thinking on it for some time,” Uriah said, rubbing his chin, “so I can provide you with a whole host of reasons.”

“Oh happy chance,” Davida grumbled.

“Ain’t it, though?” Uriah chuckled. “Now despite what you may have heard, it’s neither unclean nor uncomfortable if it’s gone about right, from what I hear. Some women enjoy it—perhaps you’d find yourself among their number. For my part, it ought to be tight as a vice, and if I can’t have your cunt, well, this would be the nearest thing.”

Davida flushed violently at this, and said he had more nerve than a sanatorium.

“An’ all incurable,” he laughed. “Think on it, and see if you don’t want to give me this little present. Why, you do enjoy being taken, you know, and you might find you like this better than you expect.”

That evening Davida crossly asked what the thing would even involve, and Uriah told her all the clinical aspects of the business, stressing that it wouldn’t happen all at once. For a day or two, they’d proceed as usual, and he’d ease her into accepting these new civilities by degrees. If she found the introduction not to her taste, they’d leave off. 

It was strange. Not as familiar and immediately pleasurable as his fingers in her in the accustomed fashion. Everything felt larger, though he went gently enough—apparently a downside of this form of mutual assistance was that he wouldn’t able to go as freely or as roughly as he might, were this intercourse in the traditional sense. Still, he said, slicking his fingers with oil, the picture of self-satisfaction, he was quite looking forward to the novel experience. Wasn’t she? Ah, there wasn’t anything so beguiling in her mouth as that pleasant ‘yes, Uriah’, well, with perhaps _one_ exception, and would she kindly refrain from smacking him? It did spoil the mood, somewhat.

On the appointed night they met in her bedroom. Davida was trepidatious but determined, while Uriah seemed close to gleeful: he practically hummed with triumph. They hadn’t met in her room after their second encounter, and their inconvenient office venue and the chance of discovery alike had conspired to keep Davida almost fully clothed during their rendezvous. Now Uriah rubbed his hands together as he watched her disrobe, and partway through Davida asked if he’d rather do it. He leapt at the opportunity, though it went slower—she had to explain all the fastenings and ties to him, and he studied them quite carefully as they went. He stripped off his own clothing quickly and without thought, and she felt as though she barely had time to look at him (skin stretched over long bones and an immortal spirit—there sometimes seemed more life in him than there was in other men) before he was urging her down on her hands and knees on her feather bed, nudging her legs apart and running his hands over her spine, her arse, every scrap of her. He pulled her hair loose and watched it spill over her back and made a low noise of satisfaction at the sight.

“Davida,” he murmured, and she started, for he hardly ever called her that, “do you remember when I told you I was grateful? Naturally you do—you’ve such a memory, and it wasn’t so long ago. Only I am feeling particularly grateful to you, just at present.” He stroked her cunt to relax her, and Davida was near to peaking when he slid a slick finger into her arse, and then a second. The strangeness of this less familiar sensation delayed her orgasm, but the pressure of his fingers against the thin wall separating this channel from her cunt made her gasp and bury her head in her arms and, unthinking and thus unembarrassed, hitch her hips up further. Uriah’s fingers were shaking when he added a third, using a clean hand to again pet her cunt. He fucked in and out of her arse with his fingers, and she made a low, breathy noise with every thrust, and pushed back against him. She realized she wanted more, and she remembered what _he’d_ wanted, drunk and less inhibited that usual after her birthday dinner.

“Uriah please,” she whimpered, putting it on slightly, letting her soft imprecation skate the edge of self-parody, “please fuck me, won’t you? Ury, please? I’d take it as such a favour.”

“Oh you clever little bitch,” he swore, delighted, correcting himself immediately, “no, I’m sorry dearest, I mean it as a compliment, I—”

“I know,” Davida reassured him. “This time, I know. And it is all right. Provided you hurry.”

“Instantly, madam,” he vowed.

He removed his fingers, and she bit her lip when he replaced them with what could only have been his cock, pushing into her slowly, down and down, until he was completely housed.

“There,” he breathed, panting, “that’s done it. And you’re not hurting for it?”

She shook her head and said that he could move, if he liked. He did, and toyed with her breasts and her clitoris as he slid into and out of her—slowly and carefully, patient and inexorable. He appeared to need the rhythm as much as she did, but for his own reasons. He seemed to want to push back and to delay his climax, to make this last as long as possible. Davida liked it very well, now that they’d come to it, and liked it better yet as they went along, but still she felt as though, if anything, he must have liked it even better than that. After a while Uriah seemed almost to fall into a daze, and though she couldn’t see his face, everything about the languid glide of his hands on her back and sides and thighs and arse and breasts and cunt and the lazy liquid quality of his voice was suggestive of bliss.

“You can’t imagine how pretty and welcoming you look, taking me in,” he said with rich satisfaction, tracing the ring of muscle that admitted him with the fingertips he’d used to open her up for himself. “Really you never could. It’s enough to break a man’s ‘art, it is.”

“You need my fingers, don’t you?” he practically cooed when Davida made a stifled sound, straining after her peak. The fullness in her and the quick pumps in and out of her body had brought her to the brink, and his petting only worsened matters. “Of course you do,” he agreed with himself, sliding the fingers of his clean hand into her and steadily working his thumb against her. “Don’t I know what you need? And you’ll come for me, won’t you? Like this? Oh yes, I should think you do, and will,” he insisted as if to himself, immensely gratified when Davida choked a climax into her much abused pillow. She greatly appreciated having something inside her to clench around: it made the peak feel fuller and better, and she liked the idea of pleasing him thus with her coming. He hadn’t quite anticipated the effect this would have on him, however, and he collapsed upon her back, panting hot into her ear, at the tight constrictions around him. He came with a soft ‘oh’ such as she’d never heard from him before, and when he pulled away the sight of his essence smeared in her, dribbling out slightly with his withdrawal, seemed to knife into him: he made a sound as though he’d been stabbed.  

Afterwards they curled up next to one another for a while. Davida surveyed the jagged, strong, wire-thin quality of his limbs and thought that in his own way, he was brittle and slight, wasn’t he?

“Tell me the worst thing you ever did, besides me,” Uriah asked quietly, and if she thought it an odd way of making conversation after intimacy, it didn’t surprise her, coming from him.

She decided to tell him (the commission of one extreme act, and its associated vulnerability, seeming almost to call forth the performance of another), though she’d kept the information back when he and his mother together had initially shaken her down for the facts of her life, in what Uriah had laughably called ‘taking tea’ rather than an outright interrogation.

“Once,” Davida said, “my Aunt was visiting a friend at some distance for a considerable period, and my mother became quite, quite ill— so much so there was a question of her death, and a long term of convalescence afterwards. Later we found out that our letters to my Aunt, intended to apprise her of the situation, had miscarried, on account of some confusion about the address. Our neighbour, Mrs. Grayper, had staying with her an old friend of her family’s—a Miss Jane Murdstone. This woman so inveigled herself into my mother’s confidence that my poor mother took her on as a companion, to help her in her illness and to give some instruction to me, for before she’d left us my aunt had said that we ought to engage some form of governess in the home, that I’d a fair mind and ought not to let it go to waste. My mother was too ill, and too pliable even when she was well, to realize that she’d brought a viper into our happy nest.

“Murdstone practiced a personal doctrine she referred to as ‘firmness’, which she used as an excuse to wrest any control over the household away from mother, and to perfectly terrorize me. She frightened me out of my wits, and I hardly learnt a lesson in her presence. My stupidity on that point annoyed her into boxing my ears and denying me dinner, which made me all the stupider, I’m afraid. I never did hear of a child doing well in the face of such threats. Any excuse to beat me secretly overjoyed her, I think, for all she said I was a great disappointment whose failures hurt my poor sick mother. The natural result of this treatment—continued, I suppose, for some six months or more—was to make me sullen, dull, and dogged. I was not made the less so by my sense of being daily more and more shut out and alienated from my mother, and from Peggotty (for Miss Murdstone was a _gentlewoman_ , and she didn’t believe in either my mixing with other children or in our collective mixing with servants—though Peggotty was worth a hundred of her in every way I might name). I believe I should have been almost wholly stupefied, but for the fact that my father had left a small collection of books in a little room upstairs. These were my only and my constant comfort.

“One day Miss Murdstone proposed to flog me with a cane for forgetting my lessons, and I tried bodily to escape her. I am ashamed to say that I bit her hand like a rabid dog in this attempt. She beat me for it as though she would have beaten me to death. I lay there, fevered and hot, and torn, and sore, and raging in my puny way upon the floor.” Davida shook her head.

“How well I remember, when my smart and passion began to cool, how wicked I began to feel! I sat listening for a long while, but there was not a sound. I crawled up from the floor, and saw my face in the glass, so swollen, red, and ugly that it almost frightened me. My stripes were sore and stiff, and made me cry afresh when I moved; but they were nothing to the _guilt_ I felt. It lay heavier on my breast than if I had been a most atrocious criminal. By way of retribution, Miss Murdstone kept me there in that little room on bread and milk, without a word from any human creature, for days. It stretched on for more than a fortnight. It seemed a lifetime—a mere day would have done, for I was only ten. I hadn’t any books, nor anything to look at but the graveyard outside, where my father was buried. I started talking to him, for want of any other friend. I came to feel a strong sense of his presence. To this day I don’t know if that was evidence of my losing my senses or a device that kept me sane. My mother, bed-ridden, had fallen into a bad spell, and was too incoherent to assist me, or even to rightly understand my predicament. Peggotty was my deliverer. She wrote to Aunt Betsey and secured her help in bodily ejecting Miss Murdstone, and in blackening her character about the town. It was after this interlude that we came to live with Aunt Betsey, while mother recovered. I think you know that part of the story, for it is how she came to better know Mr Wickfield.”

“It took me,” Davida said into the quiet, after a moment’s pause, “months to—stop speaking to my father. Or even to feel comfortable sleeping alone, once more. In fact I still sleep with a candle lit—that interlude is of course why mother won’t let anyone say a word about the expense. She feels herself responsible in some degree, though really she was Miss Murdstone’s victim, just as I was.”

“That,” Uriah said into the self-same silence, “wasn’t anything against you. You might have killed your Miss Murdstone, an’ it wouldn’t have been. Indeed, someone ought to have done it. My singular point of confusion is that it gave you any guilt at all. But then you are a soft thing, aren’t you? You’ve no stomach for cruelty.”

“Perhaps I don’t,” Davida admitted, tracing his ribs with her fingertips. “Or at least not a lasting appetite for it. I’ve never since felt inclined to bite anyone at all.”

“Well,” Uriah said, “try it on me, if such an urge should visit you. For I don’t imagine I’d mind. I wouldn’t mind dispatching with them as ran my old charity school, either, for I had something like your luck, there. I don’t feel inclined to it at present, but sometime or other I’ll tell you about that lot.” They were quiet for a while, and then Uriah said, “my father was a sexton, you know.”

“Mm,” Davida answered. “Before he became—a partaker of glory, wasn’t it?” She’d always thought that was quite a theatrical turn of phrase, for a man of the law: at eleven it had rather impressed her, and she wondered now whether, at fifteen, Uriah had felt himself grand in saying it—in dispatching of his griefs in such a lofty fashion.

“Just so,” Uriah agreed, with the strange expression that might have been, for someone else, a grin or a huff of laughter. “I used to help him, for in the last years of his life he wasn’t very strong—it was a lingering illness that took him, and graves is difficult to dig. You can’t imagine what a lot of dirt there is in a six-foot deep hole. Do you know, Miss Copperfield, what an ossuary is?”

She’d never heard the word, and he nodded as though he’d expected as much. “No, you wouldn’t, for it’s not in much use in England. It’s quite the thing in Paris, though—some of your queer French fashions—and my father told me all about it. For he was always diligent in his trade, and keen to know more of it. As I am in mine, in my ‘umble way.”

She finished the last clause with him, dropping her h with exaggeration, as though the thing were heavy. Uriah gave her an irritated look for her pains. “Well,” she shrugged, “if you will insist on doing it. Pray continue, for my impatience with your manner aside, I am interested.”

“Oh thank you,” he said most sarcastically, though he seemed amused. “I so treasure up these little marks of your condescension. Well then. Most cities ‘ll build their cemeteries away from human habitation, as you might expect. But through misadventure, Paris always had ‘em smack in the middle of everything—why, on the very edge of their great food market, if you can believe it. Healthy, I expect. These got to be filled to overflowing pretty quick. To make room, they exhumed the old bones and budged ‘em up, packed ‘em and stacked ‘em. Sixty years ago, though, that practice proved inadequate, and the place bulged. A great mound tall as my father—well, about as tall as I am now, I suppose—contained all the dead of centuries of plague, famine and war. They knew they had to commit to some course when the basement in a property hard-by spilled open under the sheer weight of the mass grave behind it. Am I frightening you, Miss Copperfield?”

She gave him a look. “You know that you are not. When did you ever know me to shy from a history or a ghost story?”

“Well,” he waved a long hand, “some women won’t have it, you know. Now what they did was condemn all the parish cemeteries within the walls, as it were, and create catacombs. Vast ones—people visit ‘em, now. They say it’s six million souls in there, the mortal remains of which are stacked into walls of arranged bones. It took ‘em two years to remove ‘em all to their new abode. Every night for that period, they’d have a great procession of wagons covered in black cloth, conveying the bodies en masse. Think it a sort of second funeral, for the jumbled unknown bodies.”

She listened to him, wide-eyed, and his grip on her shoulder tightened, as if he liked the look of her, looking at him.

“Some eternal rest, eh? Perhaps it might comfort you to know that things ain’t so bad here, and that you can expect your father to lie undisturbed a good while. True, you can’t look at him out your window any longer, but at least for the present, he’s sleeping pretty well. Your father was a peaceful man, by all accounts, and the wicked world can’t get at ‘im, where he is. It comforts me a little to think that fewer people can grind my father under foot now than they used to, for all he’s come to lie under the earth he worked.”

Davida regarded Uriah, and ventured, “they do call it a levelling. ‘Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away: O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe, should patch a wall to expel the winter flaw!’”

“Your Amlet’s a deep one, but I wouldn’t ‘ave ‘im for a co-conspirator for the world,” Uriah said. “Lady Macbeth, maybe, if she didn’t falter in the closing stretch, when it was too late to do aught but cry about it. Amlet’s nothing like as clever as he thinks himself—at any rate, he don’t know much about the business of graves. For didn’t I say the parish cemeteries got cleared out? You’ll notice I made no mention of the mausoleums, which remained inviolate. Death itself looks pretty different for the rich and the poor, and about all that gets levelled is that mound of paupers’ bodies, in the end. And _that_ only to make the air sweet for the burghers. Why if some poor suburb had been thus afflicted, it’d be waiting ‘till Doomsday for its release.”

“Little as I know of the world,” Davida said, “I know too much of it to think you wrong.”

“Haven’t you a poem on those lines?” he asked.

“I have not so far descended as to record my circumstances in English versification,” Davida said firmly, as though insisting on a point of honour.

“Not your own,” he clarified. “I mean to say, isn’t there a song or some such that says—well, you read it out once. You learnt it in school. Something about birds of prey. Rhymed with something about the May.”

“Ah!” Davida recalled, “I recollect the one you mean. ‘Now let us sport us while we may, and now, like amorous birds of prey, rather at once our time devour than languish in his slow-chapt power. Let us roll all our strength and all our sweetness up into one ball, and tear our pleasures with rough strife thorough the iron gates of life: thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we will make him run.’”

“That’s the very one,” Uriah assured her, kissing her a last time before standing and resuming his clothing. He could hardly bide here, after all. Yet something about the look on his face when he as near as congratulated her on her recital made Davida suspect that Uriah had remembered the poem as well as she had—after all, he’d shared a house with her for the better part of the day while she was learning the thing, walking about the premises muttering it and trying her diction on its delivery. While Uriah was one to tear his pleasures with rough strife through any little keyhole the world offered him, and while they were currently enjoying such pleasures as time afforded them (as enjoined by the poet, though with certain qualifications as to chastity), something about the covert way Uriah had asked to hear the poem made Davida suspect it had a deeper resonance for him.

She ran over the rest of the it within herself as she slid into a nightgown and bound up her hair, and checked the hall for him—the bitter, disconcerting elements giving her pause. “Then worms shall try that long preserved virginity.” Did he think of himself as such, ‘umble’ as he was? She glanced at him and looked away before he caught her at it. “And your quaint honour turn to dust”. Custom had made Davida comfortable with their liberties by now, but she felt a stab of guilty anxiety once again, as though she’d never yet touched him. Was that all he thought her—quaint, and worse still a hypocrite in it, because of what they did? What she allowed him to do? She knew herself to be sentimental and passionate, but in a general way she thought of these qualities as her strengths, and as true a way of looking at things as any. She had thought that for all its assumed authority and bluster, cynicism was less capable of enabling its bearer to see the world in its complexity than her perspective: that cynicism was a self-absorbed act of reduction that often blinded its possessor, rather than a widening aperture through which one extended oneself and looked upon other objects, other people, as empathy was. She didn’t think she was a fool, and she didn’t think her actions at odds with her professed feelings, but perhaps Uriah saw her as a little idiot who mouthed ‘no’s and platitudes, and yet let him sod her like a common whore.

Was that what he thought he was doing to her—wearing her down, and turning her to dust? Was it, perhaps, what he’d like to accomplish? Possibly it amused him, to thus degrade her in his own eyes and to celebrate her degradation. She thought she’d made him happy, a very little while ago. Perhaps she had, and perhaps he hated her for it. She didn’t know whether any of this was fair to him: she felt, as much as anything, like a horse collapsing after running a long race, or a boxer after the final round of a tough bout. She’d given him too much of her body and mind, and pulled him in too close, and having opened so wide and been so brave she could feel herself snapping shut, and a belated fear closing in around her, too late to be of any use.

“Uriah,” she murmured. He turned to her, his hand poised on the door, with a curious look. She didn’t know, however, what she intended to say. Did she wish to ask him whether he was still ‘grateful’, and whether he still ‘esteemed’ her? Could she possibly trust his response? She thought she might like to be held, but didn’t know whether he was a right source of comfort, or what he’d make of it. Did it matter to her what he thought, so long as she felt herself in the right? Did she want to tell him this business must stop, unpleasant as the thought of such a cessation was to her? (And how would Uriah take such a proposal?) They’d had their fun, and no one knew, and better to stop now, before anyone was hurt—if she could so ill contain herself, perhaps she ought to think of early matrimony, and set herself to falling in love with someone or other. Though in another sense Davida thought that, like her Aunt, she could happily live with more independence than most wives enjoyed, and that as such a precipitous marriage was as an option as ill-suited to her character as it had been to her Aunt’s.

Uriah frowned at her. “Did you hate it after all?” he asked, looking a little worried by her uncertain expression. “We needn’t try it again—leastways not for awhile. I thought you liked it, but if you didn’t, why, there’s an end to it, and with no grief on either side.”

“No,” Davida shook her head, “no, I only—wanted to say that I did. That you were right, and that it was far nicer than I might have expected. Good night.”

He nodded, and for an instant she wondered, owing to the narrowing of his eyes, whether he accepted this explanation of her thoughts. But then he settled into looking pleased with her compliment (and likely with the chance of a reprisal), and he slipped out the door. Davida bore to bed a good deal of confusion—for there was no one she could ask for counsel, and in the great wood she wandered in, she vacillated as to what direction to head.

***

Davida had found herself an unexpected success at the public dance held at Forresters’ Hall on the High Street. She and Agnes had gone with their mother, after Davida had cajoled Agnes into agreeing to attend. Agnes had danced but a little, and had then retired into conversation with young Mister Adams, who Davida knew to have formerly been head-boy at Doctor Strong’s establishment. Davida, the livelier dancer of the sisters, was so much in demand that she could hardly get away from the crush. She was worn off her feet, and her mother came away with a little handful of introduction cards from men who proposed to call on the family in the coming days.

“It’s a credit to how uncommonly pretty our Davida looked this evening,” Clara said warmly to Peggotty in their own hall as Peggotty helped them all off with their bonnets.

“Mother!” Davida laughed, feeling a little embarrassed, and noting Uriah lounging against the door frame of his office, having been attracted by the bustle and noise of their arrival. “I am sure Agnes looked lovelier, for her part, as she always does, and that many young men dance for the love of company without meaning much by it. Surely they might wish to increase their circle of acquaintance for much the same reasons, unless they are the least sociable creatures in the world. I myself like to talk to people, just for the sake of talking to them.”

“Your Aunt Betsey would call you a Baby,” her mother said with a smile and a shake of her head, “for all that you aren’t wholly wrong. Didn’t you find that Clarence fellow quite became his regimentals?”

Mindful of Uriah’s raised eyebrow in the background, Davida laughed again, awkwardly. “I hardly noticed, mother.”

“You hardly noticed over the course of three dances?” her mother said, as if despairing of her.

“Now you sound like the Old Soldier,” Davida said, trying to tease away her increasing and not wholly explicable sense of guilt.

“The Old Soldier must be credited with certain talents,” Clara admonished her daughter. “For didn’t she see her Annie married quite, quite happily?”

“To as sweet-natured a man as ever I’ve met,” Peggotty concurred, hanging the bonnets. “And so learned! Perhaps our bright Davida wants a man of learning, before she’s impressed. One of them Cowbridge sorts.”

“Cambridge,” Uriah muttered in the background, unregarded except by Davida, who shot him a sour look for mocking her Peggotty. (Cow for Ox, and a conflation of the two universities—an easy enough mistake, really, if one had as little to do with universities as Peggotty had.) Truly, it was as though no one but her had _noticed_ Uriah there, very much in hearing distance. Davida would have called him a difficult man to ignore, save for that sometimes he seemed almost to be capable of rendering himself invisible to all but her.

“We might go to London,” Clara said, taking up the idea, “and try a season for you both, in a modest way. We ought to have the means, at present. I might ask your father.”

Agnes and Davida exchanged slightly alarmed glances. “Mother,” Agnes said respectfully, “as much as Davida liked _this_ ball, I am not sure that either of us are up to the diversions of a whole season in town.”

Clara shook her head. “Well _I_ should like it, Agnes! I never had a season myself, and when I think how good it would be to do better by my daughters—” Clara patted Agnes’ hair. “And it isn’t all dances, you know—there is the Royal Academy, which I think you’ll particularly enjoy, my dear Agnes. Davida could use the trip to look at a wider range of bookshops in person, rather than writing to them with her requests as she must at present. How often I have heard you wish they put out better catalogues of their offerings, my child! You could each do with a visit to good London milliners, now you are women grown, and Davida should meet that man who wants to syndicate her little articles in person—her father or some legal personage ought to be with her, to look over the terms. And Davida,” she fixed her daughter with a knowing look, “shouldn’t you like to go to the theatre? Why we might go near every night you’re not otherwise engaged, whilst in town—”

Davida was not proof against this last intelligence, and she began to warm visibly to the prospect. With increasing animation, she spoke of the plays she really hoped to see at some point and the likelihood of any of them being given over the course of the Season, and the pantomime, and how she’d read that the Albion Saloon had recently been licensed to perform full-length plays, and wasn’t that charming? A theatre in an ale-house! The place had never been intended to be put to such a purpose, and that was the captivation of it to her. If it had ever been meant to be a theatre, she might have thought it small, or inconvenient; but never having been designed for any such use, it became a perfect marvel. As such Davida wished to see it for herself—properly escorted, of course. Even Agnes caught and shared in Davida’s burgeoning enthusiasm, for Davida could bring near anyone along with her in her feelings.

When she came into Uriah’s office in a short while, for once she found him not at work. Often he finished the letter or what have you he was drafting (with his peculiar quirk of looking up at her while his pen moved right along, chatting with her all the while) before he put his labours aside and attended to his guest (for she considered herself such, in this part of the house: it was so much his domain). Yet this night his elbows were propped on the desk, and his fingers were laced under his long chin, which he occasionally gave a thoughtful scrape.

“What can you be thinking on?” she asked lightly.

“Why, what indeed?” he agreed, leaning back in his chair. “My,” he looked her up and down, “how well you look this evening, Miss Copperfield!” There was something in his tone that made Davida stiffen, though his words were perfectly appropriate, and the compliment a civil commonplace. “I am not surprised that all and sundry took notice of you!” He writhed with this effusion, and there was something of sick parody in it. “And did they really? Oh, I’m not at all surprised to hear it. On the contrary, I should be surprised to hear you _didn’t_ make an impression on the company! How pleasant for you, to get to go to a dance! Much preferable to being shut up here of an evening, I am sure, for you’ve a lively disposition, and such dullness as this must be your mortal enemy.” He shook his head. “Do you dance well, Mistress Copperfield? For I’ve never seen you at it, you know.”

“Tolerably,” Davida said dryly.

“Tolerably!” Silent laughter overtook him. “No, I’m sure you don’t, at that. At a guess I’d say you’re probably light on your feet, and sought after as much for that quality as for your smiles and other charms. You must be worth the entry fee in your own right! Were there waltzes, Miss Copperfield?”

“There always are, nowadays,” she gave him, “for we have all come to take the closed embrace rather less seriously than they did in our mothers’ time.”

“Have we!” he asked, seeming almost ecstatic to receive this intelligence. “I didn’t know we had progressed so far as that—and have we, all of us? Well, well. I’m much obliged to you for telling me, for I’ve lived more retired than some, you know, and in an ‘umbler manner, and ‘aven’t become accustomed to such things. You danced those, I suppose?”

“As you have implied,” Davida said, feeling the evening souring in her mouth. “Shall I leave you, Uriah? You seem in an ill mood, and you know you needn’t oblige me if it doesn’t suit you. I have said as much to you, before now.” He’d seemed to find that hilarious, at the time.

“Leave sooner than you’re going to?” Uriah asked sharply, his mouth twisting into a smile. “I’m sure there ain’t any call for that. Whatever gave you the impression I am not in the best of humours? Oh I _am_ sorry if I’ve said anything disobliging, and if you didn’t like it then I didn’t mean a word of it. Besides, I’ve a new idea, and I’m most eager to see it put into practice—oh don’t worry,” he said on noting her wary expression, “you know I never would so overreach myself as _that!_ You may dally with me all you like and remain a maiden, available for delivery on those contractual terms: I’m as safe as houses, as you yourself must admit!”

“Are you angry with me?” Davida asked, and he tugged her hand as though leading her into a figure and spun her down on his desk, regular as a clockwork doll, still maintaining their hold.

“Why, should I be?” he asked, innocent as the morning, blinking at her as though he didn’t understand the English language, much less her accusation. “Here,” he said, shoving her skirts up and pulling his member free, “now, I won’t go inside you. _Heaven_ forbid. But it occurs to me that you and I might rut like this and come off against one another, and won’t that be sweet? Why it’s almost like having you, isn’t it? Animals do it, why shouldn’t we? You don’t mind it, do you?”

“ _No_ ,” she ground out, and then she gasped as his hard member pushed urgently against her, his cock sliding against her cunt, the head thickly hitting her clitoris.

“No,” he agreed, “bless you, you never mind anything I do, so long as it obliges you and doesn’t get too much in your way, doesn’t compromise you over much.” Davida opened her mouth to protest, but Uriah grabbed her hand in his still-cold one and said, “now doesn’t one hold hands like this in a waltz? There now, it’s almost as if we’re dancing!”

Davida, still in her finest dress, which amounted almost to a gown, couldn’t find the breath to properly remonstrate with him, as much because she was more tightly laced than usual as because he was pressing against her agreeably. She started to try, managing to gasp his name, and he swore and thrust against her, grinding into her hard. “You’ll be prettier still when I’ve come on you,” he promised, licking the rim of her ear and breathing in the smell of her hair and clutching her hand too tightly. “’n you can wear that under your gown, can’t you? Let me believe you do, at least, for I’m easily satisfied by such little lies as that. Angry with you!” he shook his head, as if flabbergasted by the thought.

“Why, how should I mind any of it?” He laughed, too brittle by half. “Why should I care about your leaving me all winter? It’s just a taste of what’s to come, that’s all, and I had better get accustomed to it. Besides, what can Christmas be to me! Oh I’d hate for you to put yourself out so as to spend an hour of it in my company.” He thrust as he spoke, and it was maddeningly good despite his confusing, hostile diatribe, even as it made Davida ache for something more, something difficult to define. At times she felt like asking him to fuck her—especially when he spoke of it in longing, enticing terms. She never did ask, but he’d built in her a core of want that she hadn’t initially known.

“How can I mind your dancing with every man in town,” he continued, hysterically pleasant, his hips busy and his fingers relentless on her, “ _three times_ with an officer in regimentals, and never once with me? Or your heading to London to expand your horizons? How many men will you smile at in London, do you think? There’ll be so many opportunities, you know, for your good mother will see to that—‘near every night, when not otherwise engaged’, wasn’t it? Perhaps you’ll spend half your evenings at the theatre, and half in company, and see how many admirers you can collect between ‘em, for you’re as much of a treat to watch as anything on the stage. You’ll probably come back engaged—what sort of boy do you think you’ll fall for this time? Handsome? You _like ‘em handsome_ , don’t you? What a thing it must be, to be handsome! I really can’t imagine it!”

She trembled on the brink, but still managed to eek out, “Uriah, what’s the matter with you tonight? Pray, don’t be cruel to me!”

“I, cruel to you?” he laughed, fucking against her faster yet, making a guttural noise here and there but hardly slowing the flow of his speech to accommodate them. “Why, I suppose the fact is, _I mind_. Oh I _want_ you,” he breathed, and for a moment Davida felt relieved that they were back on familiar territory: the play-talk of sex he would sometimes indulge in. But then that was ripped away from her as Uriah pushed it past its usual bounds.

“I _want_ you,” he said again, his voice wild and broken and wretched. “I want you so much I think I’ll expire from it, and nothing makes it any better—there’s no buying it off. You like hearing how I’d love to come in you, how I’d love to take your precious virginity. But you never do understand how I ache to do it, and how refraining for the benefit of someone else, _saving you for him_ , cuts me to the quick—stabs me right through the ‘art. Do you hear me, Copperfield? I _detest_ it. I suppose I’m too low for you, maybe, but I’ve my ambitions, same as any man. And to think that you can go to London to do it to me because you’re in a prosperous enough position at present—who do you suppose earned that, eh? I might as well have _paid_ for you to be thus disposed of!” Davida looked on him in shock amounting to horror, and Uriah continued, his voice a fierce hiss—even now habitually mindful of the noise.

“Aren’t you mine? Doesn’t it make sense, that it ought to be me? I’ve _had_ you, had all your other firsts. Why should I give you up?” he snarled. “Who’s going to take you from me? It’s not right or natural, that you should do all this with me and not _care_ for me. It _isn’t_. It _kills me_ to think of someone else having you, of you coming for anyone but me.”

In the midst of this wild torrent, Davida peaked for him. He felt her do it, against him, her cunt hot and slick and trembling against his cock, and he exulted in his triumph, kissing her fervently. He kept going, though, and Davida found it was the sort of peak where further sensation seemed a little painful, but yet it felt quite possible to climb again. Distracted, she made a desperate noise, and Uriah said distinctly, “God, isn’t _that_ mine? Oh Davida, if any other soul should hear _that_ —”

He choked a completion, fuelled by an ecstasy of rage and desire, and Davida thought, with strange clarity, that he was capable of doing anything to keep her. Murder was not wholly beyond him— _she_ wasn’t in danger, but the world might be. Still, she writhed against him, so very _close_ once more, and he finished her off again with a flourish, crooning to himself that no one, not even she, knew what she liked so well as he did. Horribly, he was perfectly right.

When he’d finished and panted his way back to sanity, Uriah stumbled back from her, his back hitting the wall. He seemed boneless, now, and almost liable to slide down it. His breath came in great heaves, and she stared at him, wide-eyed, attempting to process everything he’d said.

“Go,” Uriah muttered. “That is to say, I’d be ever so obliged if—no,” he laughed. “None of that. Let me alone awhile, Davida. Please. Don’t say a word, just—” A long shudder worked through his limbs.

Davida stood, arranged her skirts, and hesitantly held out a hand to touch his shoulder. He shifted to shrug it off, shaking his head. Stunned and stung, Davida left, casting a glance back at him as she slipped out the door. He was still. She’d never seen him _still_ , before.

She stayed up half the night, thinking on it. It was either a theatrical such as one rarely witnessed on the great stages of the capital itself, or he was deeply disturbed by their situation. Davida blushed to think that she hadn’t given him credit for that sort of interiority, somehow. She’d never assumed she could hurt him. Perhaps she was to blame for engaging in this with him, younger than him though she was—perhaps she’d created a kind of dependency, and ought to have known better. No one spoke of such things as the reason carnal activity outside of marriage was frowned upon, but it might be that an attachment such as this, frustrated by a lack of formal recognition, could drive a man like Uriah (who aimed at set objects wherever he could) to distraction.

He didn’t want to see her married. He didn’t want to lose the benefits of their arrangement, or he—she hadn’t seriously thought before that he might _well_ like her. He’d represented all this as a trade of favours (but then wasn’t that Uriah Heep all over?), and he’d called her an awful name for doing it (though he’d apologised, and she thought he would have done so on his knees, and maybe even meant it). But she could no longer tell herself, out of such confusions as he’d given rise to, or out of modesty or self-serving denial, that he _didn’t_ like her. Not after what she’d seen.

Was he in love with her? He might be jealous without that, or afraid of losing his entertainments. He might _well_ be. But then would she think so callously of any other man, and tell herself that the most likely possibility wasn’t even to be considered?

What did she owe him, if he were? Davida thought she ought either to break away from him (though she’d no doubt he’d say she’d entirely mistook her responsibility, there), or to try and see whether she could come to love him. For he hadn’t been fair to her, there. She did care for him. At times he annoyed her vastly, and she never knew what to make of him, even having known him long and intimately. Still, she found him endlessly fascinating, in attitudes grotesque and charming alike. Sharp and amusing. He wasn’t too easy for her, and he was never bland. He understood her, and God knew how hard he worked, and there was no one more likely to be useful in a difficulty.

She’d pitied him tonight. Even as she thought he’d detest her pity and think it quite a long ways from affection, Davida wasn’t so certain of that. She had always wanted her own faults to be pitied and excused to a degree by her friends, and for her ignorance and privilege to receive like treatment. She felt she had begun to understand and better love Uriah when she had seen her own weaknesses in him. Uriah seemed to think pity an eclipse that blocked out the very sun and made admiration or equality impossible—a feeling that murdered all other sentiments. Davida didn’t find it so. For her, pity might co-exist with a hundred other emotions, and where Uriah was concerned, she _always_ had a hundred or more feelings. For all she’d not thought sufficiently on how all this might affect him, there was no one her opinion of was more complex, and if pity didn't come into it, it'd be the one emotion that didn't.

Even when Uriah made himself an assemblage of lies and fronts, he was yet more fully _himself_ than any man she knew. And he was, in a way, a very dear friend, wasn’t he? Perhaps, in the strangest way possible, he was her very dearest (and did he have any, save her? If she was the nearest thing he had to a mortal enemy, as she’d thought she might be at times, she saw that she might also be the nearest thing he had to a companion). She felt as though she could say things to Uriah that she could say to no other soul. She felt as though she might have any extreme, ugly, reaction, and that he would bear that quietly between them and think no less of her for it. He knew her general drift too well to be shaken by any such corrections of course, working themselves out within her.

She slept hard on account of this tiring brooding, and later than was her wont. She supposed he thought she was avoiding him by failing to come down (she hadn’t any school today), because halfway through the morning he contrived to slip a letter under her door. A _letter_ —he was never so stupid as that, committing anything to paper! The fact of it was bad enough. The contents, at least, were unobjectionable. They might have had any cross exchange of words, and if she told anyone that Uriah was over-doing it and making much of nothing even by penning such a missive, Davida knew they would believe her readily enough. He begged her to forget it all. He’d been wildly out of sorts, and he so hoped things could go on as they had done, with their ‘accustomed friendship’ (she snorted) unaltered. Reams of obsequious apologies, your obedient servant (God in heaven, what if he were?), U. Heep.

Davida threw it on the fire when she’d finished, taking care that not a scrap of it remained, and thoroughly disordered the ashes so there didn’t look to be too many of them.

She saw that she had to settle Uriah’s nerves immediately, because the Lord alone knew what he might get up to if he were left to stew unanswered. Ten o’clock, and he was already occasioning a need to burn correspondence as though she were some sort of spy. So she timed it right and slipped into his office with a substantial tea when he ought to have gone home for his, and she hardly let him speak for reassurances that it was all forgotten, he’d simply been overworked and overwrought, as he said. This apparently being exactly what he wanted to hear, Uriah drank it in greedily. He came into her hand, nodding eagerly as she assured him that they were as good of friends as ever they were. She kissed him and reminded him that she was due at a party at the neighbours’ that evening, and prayed he wouldn’t wait up for her, and that he’d not let on to Peggotty what had become of the last of the seed-cake (which took pride of place on his tray).

At times she felt herself in deep water with Uriah, and no match for him—yet sometimes he was as easily managed as the nervy, frightened, starving boy he could sometimes look, when he was at his most defensive. She thought on the balance of power between them that evening, when, as seemed to be happening more than she was prepared for or comfortable with of late, the subject of her incipient marriage to someone or other (it didn’t seem to much matter who) arose. A Matron of the Neighbourhood took it upon herself to opine, in reference to the trip to London that was in contemplation, that it was rather a waste of time for Davida to make arrangements regarding her publication. She’d be married soon, and have too much to think of for that. Besides, not many husbands would want a notorious wife who wrote articles for a London paper, or long permit the continuance of such a state of affairs.

Davida supposed that might be the case, though when she’d spoken of the paper’s offer of broader distribution to _Uriah_ , he’d congratulated her. When these effusions had not been as jubilant as was his custom, she’d been a little cold to him, assuming him indifferent to or even prejudiced against her success. Picking up on her displeasure, he’d assured her that on the contrary, he was as proud of her as someone in his ‘umble relation to her might be—only it wasn’t entirely unexpected, was it? Her work was popular and of sound quality, and improving all the time, as she matured. He thought her success a foregone conclusion, and looked on such increases in her circulation quite as an expected inheritance. He’d called her, in a matter of fact fashion, too talented not to be recognized as such—which wasn’t to say she didn’t work at it, for when they weren’t illicitly occupied Davida still shared the light of his office and poured through books and papers for school (which drew near to its conclusion, now) and for her articles with a dedication equal to his own. Davida had told him she was thinking of trying her hand at fiction, and he’d asked her in what style. This had struck her as an intelligent response, for she liked such different authors, and didn’t know how to make her own creation out of the wide gamut of her taste. He’d showed her how he outlined a brief before writing it, twitching the arguments into their most coherent forms, and she’d said she might employ a similar device for an essay, or a story—a sonnet was supposed to be an argument really, did he know that? He hadn’t, but it had interested him, and—

“Davida?”

Davida’s head shot up, and she realized the whole little company of women was looking at her, expecting an answer to—to—

“I’m sorry,” Davida said, faltering, “I was a world away.”

Someone suggested she was thinking on a sweetheart after all, and inwardly, Davida died on her sword like an antique Roman. She marshalled herself to appear sagacious and worldly and involved in the conversation of the moment (at least to _try_ to present such an image, at any rate, with what few resources she possessed in these regards). At length, when the Matron of the Neighbourhood had departed, and even her mother and Agnes had begged leave, and only a small company of close friends of a similar age (ranged across about ten years, with Davida at the narrow end) remained, the talk came to quite confidential matters. An old school friend of Davida’s, recently wedded, complained of the onerous duties of her new position. To be sure, Davida said grandly, managing a household was no trifle. But the other women laughed at her, and one said that if Clara was too dainty to warn her, someone ought to. They were not speaking of menus, but of greater perils still. There would come a time when one’s husband would—

“Oh!” Davida flushed, “why I have of course been informed of all of that!”

“Not,” her old friend insisted, “of the vileness of it though, I expect! That, your mother would spare you.” She unfolded a tale of great boredom, while another contested that there was nothing but hassle and pain involved. A third protested of the sheer grotesquery of it, which the others were unaccountably leaving out. It was much to be avoided, where possible.

“And,” Davida asked, awkwardly, “is there—no way of making it easier on yourselves? Forgive me, but is there no little enjoyment to be got from it? You might, if you don’t like those things, try something else.” All seemed dubious of this prospect, and to believe, with this suggestion of alternate acts, that Davida simply did not know whereof she spoke. “Or perhaps you could go about it more slowly,” Davida insisted. “He might—” she faltered, for she could not evidence too much experience and say the thing directly, “make it nicer for you, somehow or other. Surely it needn’t be so horrid as you say!”

They shook their heads sadly, pitying her inexperience and the fall that awaited her. “It is a simple fact of life,” her old school friend said with authority. “All one can do is bear one’s lot. And naturally, I like my Herbert for other reasons.”

In the vestibule, when Davida was pulling on her muffler, another friend who’d hardly spoken in that indiscreet conversation addressed herself quietly to her. “I would never embarrass them by saying it in company,” Eleanor, another old girl of the school, murmured to Davida, “but you needn’t be so frightened as they make out. As you’ve guessed, in your innocence, there are ways of rendering the thing not at all painful, and even very pleasant for all parties, if you’ve an open mind and a willingness to work with your partner. Why you can tell those girls never boarded as I did—” Eleanor cut herself off, leaving Davida with more questions than she’d come in with.

“The fact of the matter is,” Eleanor continued, “one’s choice of partner matters immensely. Don’t excuse cruelty on any account, and don’t accept stupidity or the sort of stubbornness that will accept no counsel. That’s important anywhere in a marriage, and it’s no less important in one’s bedchamber. I married a kind man, and I have found his kindness a great advantage. Most women, I think, have a poor opinion of the marriage bed owing to poor experiences therein, when they do not _need_ to, as far as the act itself goes. All the marriage manuals advise mutual caresses. That goes some way, but it is vague—you wouldn’t bake bread on such advice as that. If you’ve trouble with it when the time comes, you may come to me in deepest confidence, and I’ll frankly lay it all before you.”

Davida thanked Eleanor for, as Eleanor thought, allaying her fears—though in truth she thanked Eleanor more for her effort of kindness. Davida was more than a little confused. She had thought the carnal act was simply quite, quite wonderful. She hadn’t realized it could be done badly, and that this was in fact, apparently, the norm, or at least very common. Why ever did women fall, if, unlike her, they didn’t find the consequences of even a little teetering absolutely delicious? She knew Uriah to possess a certain skewed genius, but she hadn’t realized it extended to his being unusually good at making her come (which the other women, save Eleanor, simply _had not seemed to do_ , judging by their descriptions!).

The next day, Davida had a private conversation with her mother.

“I think, mother,” she began, “that Mr Heep might have been offered a position elsewhere. I was looking through his desk for a paper for father, and I saw a missive I suspect to have been to that effect. I didn’t mean to pry, I’m sure!”

“Of course not,” Mrs Wickfield agreed, absolving her. Davida felt slightly monstrous for misleading her own dear mother, though if Uriah had not yet received such a letter, he might yet do, and should have done ‘ere now. Davida had taken the opportunity of asking some of her female friends whose husbands or families were likewise connected with the law how Uriah was regarded in a professional sense, and come away with an impression that men of the business thought him shrewd as Old Nick, a hard man to get ‘round, stubborn on his points and possessed of an infernal energy. Heep compromised to his advantage, but he never did forget a thing in his favour. Ruefully, a Misses Someone-Else-In-The-Business had concluded that for all she’d head his name shrieked in tones of despair about the premises, if she ever requited representation she’d go to Mr Heep rather than her own husband, for it seemed one of them was sure to carry the business, and it wasn’t her dear George.

“It’s to the good that we know,” Clara said of the threatened separation, “for I’ve thought, ever since we spoke of it last month, that something along these lines might happen some day or other, once Uriah’s been given his papers. It hadn’t occurred to me before then, but once you laid it out I saw it clearly—you are so remarkable in your capacity for making a person see a thing. Yes, Uriah will be articled very soon, but why don’t we make him a partner when it happens? For the firm would be at sea without him. It shouldn’t represent a great strain for Mr Wickfield—why if anything, that energetic young man ought to increase the value of the firm, and provide you girls with more of an inheritance out of your portion. I’ll speak to your papa,” Clara said decidedly, “and it shall all be worked out. Trust me, once I put the possibility of Mr Heep’s _going_ to him, I haven’t any doubt that he’ll regard it in the right light.”

A long acquaintance with steady, encouraging Mr Wickfield and the cooperative management of his household with the support of dear Peggotty and her girls had made Clara more confident in her own judgment in worldly matters than she’d been as a young wife. While not a grave, serious creature yet, Clara now thought of some womanly purview on her husband’s affairs and attendant council as her responsibility as his friend. She trusted herself to offer up advice, where it was born of the love of her family and an upright spirit towards others.

“And if Mr Heep were a partner, he might have a clerk of his own, and get along better still,” Davida suggested, feeling sly and thus greatly ashamed of herself—though she _did_ think it right that Uriah would not be kept so loaded with cares as he was. She’d never, as a girl, quite understood his role in the business, or how disproportionate it now seemed to her.

“There too, you and Agnes have the Trotwood money to fall back on, should it all go wrong,” Clara commented. “For I know your aunt has made some provision for Agnes as well as you, considering you both her nieces. Your poor dear father also left you and I a little annuity, besides. Davida—”

Mrs Wickfield hesitated, and yet Davida suspected nothing, which caused her all the greater shock when the conversation turned at an unexpected angle.

“I admit I never considered it before your birthday, when the two of you got on so well and sat next to one another like a very courting pair, but—you and Mr Heep are good friends, are you not, Davida? For I’ve always noted his attentiveness to you, as a mother must note these things. I wonder if that isn’t why you’ve been so uncomfortable, when anyone mentions the chance of your marrying, or with the like prospect of going to London for the season? Have we all missed something, my darling?”

Davida flushed, and said that she only meant to secure Mr Heep a better position out of fairness, and because it seemed to everyone’s advantage. Clara agreed, but said, in a kindly voice, “has anything been said on the other matter?”

“No,” Davida said quietly, “and nothing may be. I am not sure _I_ —or _he_ —”

“Take time,” her mother advised. “Think on it, my love. Though now _I_ think on it, it does make a kind of sense. He has been here the whole of your youth, and he isn’t much older than you really, is he? You’re far handsomer than he is, of course, but that needn’t be a crushing disparity, for there are other qualities. Besides, a handsome man can prove himself a menace, as your Aunt Betsey has shown us. Mind you, his manner is—” Clara’s lip twisted, “well, but he is a good attorney. No one thinks him a natural fool, for all he capers. And he'd be kind to you, I think, which is important. No one, not even Betsey herself, thought your father and I well-matched, for I was an orphaned governess twenty years his junior. But we were happy together, for the short time the Lord allotted us, and he loved me immensely, I know. It needn’t be this man, but I should like to see you settled with someone steady, who will treasure you—just as your father, whose dear name you bear, esteemed me. If you were to find someone worthy of you near at hand, why, that would be all to the good, for you’ve so many friends here, and should be near all your relations.”

Davida pressed her mother’s hand fervently with her own. “You’re too good to me,” she said, feeling, with shame, as though she truly had not done well enough by her mother’s respect for her judgment. “Mother—if I should consider it, as you suggest, and if I were to say that I did wish it, and he the same, well then, what of father?”

Clara Wickfield frowned, and said that her daughter’s choice would be unquestioned, provided it was not outright wicked or liable to prove some danger to her. “As to reconciling his heart to it,” Clara said thoughtfully, “it will, I think, take some time to bring Mr Wickfield around. For he is very fond of you, and not accustomed to regard Uriah as quite a gentleman. You’ll have to be patient and bear with him a while, so as not to upset the family. But when Mr Heep’s been a partner for a year or two, and when your father has become accustomed to regarding him in that capacity, it may all seem quite a natural progression by degrees. Everyone may find it almost obvious for Mr Wickfield’s partner to marry the daughter of the house, whom he was almost brought up with. I suspect that if they think on it, the union between two people of your characters will seem all the more appropriate to them—for I know no one so energetic and diligent and clever with words as the two of you, and where there are inequalities, you might balance one another well. I am more romantic than my present husband, and such arrangements have certain advantages. For I can tell him if the sunset is worth looking at, and he can tell me if it bodes rain.” (Davida was sure that her that Mr Wickfield would grumble that if Uriah were a sunset, notwithstanding the rich red hue, it would _not_ be worth looking at, and it _would_ bode rain.)

Davida came to Uriah’s office earlier than usual that evening, and the two of them talked lightly and worked (or Davida tried to—she found herself unaccountably nervous) for a while. As the hour drew on, Uriah began to visibly listen for something. His body was tight with attention. At last, they both heard the final soft click that signalled the last member of the household bar them going to bed, turning the latch for the night. Uriah leaned back in his chair and relaxed like a coil someone had contrived to let all the tension out of. His long limbs seemed to loosen and stretch, and his rigid, official posture (enlivened as it was by occasional dramatic flourishes) to become somehow in an instant luxuriant and obscene. He rapped his desk by way of invitation.

“I thought we might talk a little first,” Davida said, lightly enough, standing as she spoke. Everyone’s going to bed meant they could be freer with their words.

“Why,” he grinned at her, “can’t we talk with you on my lap as well as anywhere?”

She gingerly assented, and with some small remarks to the effect that that was better, wasn’t it, Uriah settled his hands about her waist and asked what she’d wanted to say, then.

“This is wholly unconnected with anything but your own merits,” Davida said with a jerk. “You must understand that, to begin. Now, my mother—mind, it isn’t certain yet, though as near as—well, my mother, as I say, believes that when you receive your articles, you might also be let into a partnership with father. I told her I thought you’d an offer elsewhere, to make her see that you might do, and she said that would be enough to bring father ‘round to a consideration of how inconvenient the loss of you would be.”

Uriah’s eyes were flinty and focused on her, and his grip had stiffened.

Davida frowned at him. “Uriah? Aren’t you pleased? I’m sorry if I was mistaken, but I understood this to be what you most wished for!”

“Oh yes,” Uriah said with half a laugh, “to be sure, I wanted to be made a partner in the firm. Why it’s only everything I’ve schemed for, delivered into my lap,” he gave her a little squeeze, “as I expect you know! Oh, I’d be in raptures, if I weren’t wondering what it had cost. Because it occurs to me this elevation might also be my walking papers, mightn’t it? You never cared before that the business would fare better in my hands. You’re not so interested in the law and in your profits for their own sake as that. Neither did you greatly tax yourself about my ‘ealth and ‘appiness, afore now. So tell me, Davida, am I being bought off?”

“I’m sorry,” Davida faltered, “for I didn’t regard your predicament with the sympathy and understanding I should wish to bring to bear on the life of a fellow creature, much less a friend. I know it, and I deserve a measure of rebuke there. And no, I’m not—so interested in the family business as I might be. I know that too.”

“Yet you don’t say a word about my chief complaint. There we have it, I expect. So I _am_ to be bought off, am I?” he seethed, clutching her compulsively, pulling her down against him to hiss into her face, “An’ given your pity, too, at the last—the only virtue of yours I never did covet, for all I yearned after your _sympathy_ and your _understanding_ , as you put it. There’s a sight of difference between ‘em! Why I might have known you hadn’t forgiven me my lapse, Copperfield, whatever you said and however you gentled me. _I might have known it!_ You’ve always thought me beneath you, and so I am—there was a time when that suited you well enough,” he gave her a lewd, shrewd look, “but never you mind. Frightened you, did I, with the barest intimation of—” he swallowed, hard, and glared at her with a mighty, towering defiance. The look on his face was ferocious as the expression borne by any cornered animal, but it was as determined as that of any man.

He growled, “and I’m to be thus _pacified_ , thus placated, with one partnership in the stead of another? Well I won’t be bought off thus, Copperfield! I won’t go quietly. You had better take and fire a loaded gun at me. Oh don’t fear I’ll disclose you to anyone, an’ I can hardly force your compliance—I’d disdain to do it, too. But if you aim to pity me, why, I’ll have that. I _hate_ your pity, but if it’s all I can have of you, I’ll take it! If that’s how this must go, then you won’t rest between the elements of earth and air for pitying me, I swear you won’t. I won’t make it easy on you—if I’m to suffer, and I _will_ , then I’ll make you inescapably aware of the fact. I’ll harry you, night and day. Try giving me up under such conditions as that—you’ll beg to have me back, an’ I’ll oblige you.”

Davida watched him carefully. “How cynical you are,” she said, “but yet how against your own interests you speak! Don’t you see that if you made my home a hell—”

“Oh, Mistress Copperfield!” he interrupted her. “Those are very ‘arsh words!”

“Put my meaning into any words you like,” said she. “As I think you have done with all of this, and as I suspect you often do. You know what you propose, Uriah, as well as I do.”

“Perhaps so,” he replied, “but I've got a motive, as my soon to be partner is accustomed to say,” (he pronounced this with a good deal of bitterness) “an’ I go at it, tooth and nail.”

“You are always plotting,” Davida observed, “and you are so terribly good at it that you convince yourself everyone is doing the same, and lose sight of your object in the very twists of your own schemes. For have you thought that if you were to make my own house uncomfortable, I’d fly to my Aunt, or possibly to a husband who—”

“Don’t say it,” he begged. “Oh you must put it into words, must you?” he seethed. “I couldn’t myself, but it gives you no trouble, does it my _Mistress Copperfield?_ ”

A consciousness of his own powerless seemed to steal over him, and he looked at once dejected and incensed beyond the bearing of it. Davida thought of herself as low as she had ever been, raging on the floor after having bit Miss Murdstone. Why he’s my very other self, Davida thought with a sudden inclination of tenderness towards Uriah. She wished to be kind to him, even as she would have wished someone to be kind to her, even having done wrong, in her passion and her anger and her desolation at that awful hour. Davida had sometimes thought that she might have been improved entirely, and that she might have been made another creature perhaps, for life, by so much as a kind word at that season. A word of encouragement and explanation, of pity for her childish ignorance, of reassurance that whatever her little wrongs, her home was yet her home, might have made her dutiful even to Jane Murdstone in her heart henceforth, instead of in her hypocritical outside, and might have made her respect instead of hate the woman. And to think she had the power to give and to mean such a word in such a time for Uriah, and to make his awful hour right: to be as plainly and whole-heartedly decent to him as ever anyone had been cruel to her, and in doing so, to make herself worthy of the respect she could have given Jane, had Jane proved worthy of it.

“Uriah,” she said softly, “you should think better of me. You have mistaken me entirely, and done no credit to yourself in doing so. For I’ve no intention of giving you up thus. Indeed, you and I have a few things to settle, between us. Tell me honestly, if you would. What are your intentions towards the world? What do you mean to do with your life?”

He stared at her, wary and baffled. She took his hand, in a sort of dancing posture. “Uriah?” she prompted. “I’m sorry for neglecting to ask all this of you before. But I am asking now.”

“If,” he began, anger draining slowly out of him (still looking wary as a cornered beast), “I am a partner in the firm, then why—” he cleared his throat. “I should continue to aggrandise it, though with a little more leisure. I have several schemes in hand to that end, but they are all modest, and I might lay them all before you another time. The business might be got on better—”

“With help,” Davida nodded. “I told my mother we ought to engage clerks for the purpose, for you cannot be your own clerk, and father’s, and an attorney in your own right.”

“Just so, and the volume—well. It would be improved, is all. An’ I should like to take a better house for my mother, with the improvement in wages, for ours is—” he bit down on a reference to its humbleness. “Not as I might wish it to be. And as much as I love mother, I do think I might benefit from living apart from her, as I never have done. There is something about having a watch set on one that is a mite constraining.”

“I can imagine,” Davida said wryly, with a thought for the restrictions on their own proceedings and another for how effusive Mrs Heep could be. “Though I’ve always thought how fond she is of you affecting. Well,” Davida breathed, “for my part, I have never aimed directly at matrimony, though I have always considered it likely. You yourself have observed that I am, if anything, too ready in my affections. Materially, I wish to exercise myself in certain charitable projects as they come, or more directly in writing, for I have reason to suspect myself tolerably proficient there, and why be a middling housekeeper when I might hire a good one? You haven’t any philosophical objections to a woman’s writing, that I have ever noted.”

“Any husband who makes you stop isn’t worth the having,” he said sharply, and she noted that he’d not taken her reference to matrimony in an optimistic spirit. She smiled at that, and thought him half a man and half a foolish boy of twenty-two, too ready to take any slight into his head and any hurt into his heart. He might yet grow bitterer still, or more sanguine in his outlook. It would depend on circumstance: the turn of his fortunes and the company he kept. Too much keeping of his own council made his thinking cramped and circular, and turned his brilliance in to consume itself, and to fester—another’s company might spin that brilliance out. And who knew what might become of it then?

“No,” she agreed, “I suspect you are right, there. What I’d like to do, you see, is to write to other women engaged in similar work. I have already gotten up a list of names. If I might learn a little of magazine publication—what I am thinking of is a kind of woman’s circular, evolved into a professional outfit. Perhaps it might appeal to the whole of the family, but my core conception of it is as a thing produced for women. Doctor Strong is a member of several learned correspondence societies, which he’s been so kind as to allow me to examine the produce of, and I know women to give one another advice in this fashion as it is. I’d need to be shrewd about the business, but I have a little capital, and I suspect a little talent both for writing and for getting people together in a cause. I was thinking of calling it Household Words, for a homely touch—though that’s something of a joke, as it’s out of warlike _Henry V_. I am as yet undecided.”

“It’s not a bad scheme,” Uriah said meditatively, “though it’d have to be carefully done, to avoid risking your funds unduly. You’d have to allay the burden with investors, and the terms—well, those would have to be favourable. Still, I suspect there’s a market for it, after you gather a head of steam with a wider London syndication and become known to folk. Depending on what it went for, you might get it into several classes of household, and thus increase your influence.”

“Yes,” Davida said thoughtfully. “There are professional opportunities for such things here, as we know, via correspondence at some distance. Or in London, possibly. As there are, I think, in law. Uriah, all of this is just to say that I think you and I could get on together, and—that there is a natural outgrowth of what we have been at, and our long acquaintance besides. Not to mention what I have gathered from your frankness two days ago, and this evening. I don’t yet say I love you, but I do feel certain I could come to it. Indeed, I have at times a tender inclination towards you almost amounting to the fact itself. Though if I’m mistaken about your interest in such an arrangement, why, you are still to be made a partner, and we might continue on in any degree of friendship you choose. It is only that I find it so difficult at times to determine your actual feelings about a thing. Why even now, your expression is—”

He cut her off with a kiss: with several, in fact. “I _adore_ you,” he ground out, as though it caused him pain to do it. “You aren’t testing me, are you? Nor am I in a delusion—oh no, that is stupid, whatever am I thinking. Davida, would you really?”

“I can’t rightly say,” Davida pointed out, “for you have never asked, Uriah!”

He choked on a silent, hysterical laugh, and when he’d recovered himself, he said, in perfunctory tones (as though what he was about to say must be gone through, but all the same it was the most obvious thing in the world, and as such hardly required articulation), that he loved her and would she marry him.

She shook her head, smiling. “Not in that fashion, no. Try again. I am certain you can manage it better, with a little effort.”

“You were put on earth to torture me,” he informed her, not seeming terribly upset by this intelligence as to a divine spite thus grandly exercised against him. He said then, in tones of awful earnestness, that he loved her painfully, and that if anything on the earth could exalt his wretched soul it was this. Unflatteringly, he said she was not usually stupid, but that she had been not to pick up on how he regarded her, for his concealments had become rather frayed of late. He further contended that he always had loved her, since they were very children. Progressing from this argument, he asked whether she would do him the very great favour of marrying him: an end which had long been his greatest ambition in life. She said all this was most inspiring, and that she was certainly feeling the encouragement her own feelings required to fully blossom. And that she thought she would, yes, if it was indeed convenient for him. He kissed her for it, and she reacted favourably, and proceedings between them then progressed along the accustomed lines of one of their evenings together, albeit in more celebratory mood than they’d hitherto enjoyed one another in.

“Only,” she told him as he saw to the fastenings of his trousers, “we’ll have to be more discrete, now that mother is aware of the possibility of _in_ discretion—we spoke about you this afternoon.”

“Did you now?” he asked, seeming absolutely delighted by this intelligence, which made the thing more real.

“Yes,” she said as he pushed up against her, “though she said it might take father as long as a year or two, after you’re made a partner, to be comfortable with an engagement. And I suspect, unfortunately, that she is quite right in thinking it.”

“With an end in mind,” he assured her as he frantically uncovered her breasts, “I am a very patient man.”

“What I mean—God,” she panted as he sucked at one, his member rubbing against her cunt, “what I mean to say is that it should still be unwise for you to—”

“Fuck you?” he suggested, his mouth popping off her nipple with a wet, obscene sound.

“Yes, that, for if I were to fall pregnant—goodness, you seem to like the idea—before time, it would—”

“Make unpleasantness in the family,” he agreed, pumping against her. “And we wouldn’t want to do that, now would we, my Davida? Not on any account. For your mother almost likes me.”

“Don’t talk about my mother while you rut, Uriah, it’s disconcerting. Shall it be too much a burden to you, not to be able to reach that consummation quickly?”

“Oh,” he panted, “but with an end in sight I am, as I say, the most patient man in the _world_ —wrap your legs around me, there’s a good girl.”

And he was, too, for he never seemed to mind sparing her virginity when he knew it was stored up for his own eventual enjoyment. Indeed the denial and delay seemed a pleasurable torture to him, and Davida would have sworn he almost glutted himself on the deferred promise of it. He honoured it as sacrosanct, and would begin many a feverish, passionate recitation with ‘why, when we are married—’

Once, after their engagement had been made clear to all, Peggotty caught them behind a locked door. When Davida came to unfasten it, sheepish, Peggotty shook her head.

“Exchanging kisses, I’ll bet! It’s only to be expected, but you must be careful. People will make something of it, you know, be it innocent as anything.” She gave Uriah one of the special glares she reserved for the intended despoiler of her darling child, and he grinned back at the poor woman, unabashedly pleased with himself.

Davida Copperfield kept up her maiden name for professional reasons, and if people only on occasion referred to her as ‘young Mrs Heep’, Uriah didn’t mind—in fact even when they made love as a married couple, he alternated wildly between her names, sometimes even retaining the childish ‘Mistress Copperfield’, as though it were a memento of the earliest days of his infatuation. Mr Wickfield reconciled himself to the match but grudgingly, and was always disconcerted to see the couple kiss, even when they’d been married a decorous number of years. Uriah seemed to lay a special emphasis on the public performance of that favour on account of this. After a particularly grandiose display (there had been certain smacking noises) that had made Mr Wickfield harrumph audibly, Davida chid Uriah for it, saying that the poor old man didn’t need his nose ground into a fact that displeased him after Uriah had won his point, and that her father couldn’t respond to little upsets such as these so well as Uriah could. Uriah agreed, saying that this happy circumstance (being Mr Wickfield’s limited ability to respond to things turning in a way uncongenial to him, and to foresee and grapple with the exigencies of the world) had enabled him to get on with a good deal in life, not least fucking the man’s daughter under his nose for years undetected.

“Why, a sharper man would never have allowed it.”

“Uriah!” Davida protested.

“Yes, dearest?” he’d responded mildly, pretending ignorance as to the source of her perturbation.

They had then detoured into a long conversation about different forms of intelligence, for Mr Wickfield was by no means simple, yet he wasn’t up to much as far as people’s characters went, for all his fixation on motives. They so digressed in this vein as to forget the original source and point of their argument, and if marriage can be said to be a series of such digressions, so happily conducted as to string out over the course of years, then theirs was an eminently successful one.

 

**Author's Note:**

> beta'd by Elviapose, and the sunset joke is hers.
> 
> History notes:
> 
> \- I'm going with the Graves timeline (*shoots self*) and saying David(a)'s born about 1820, so this is happening about 1837.  
> \- I think that might be too early for the yellow jacketed 'French Novel' of ill repute, mentioned in Picture of Dorian Gray. But yellow jackets were, I think, also associated with sensation fiction from the 50s and 60s? So I think this could be right? ??  
> \- If you want more about Parisian infrastructure than wiki will give you, I really liked Paris: The Biography of a City by Colin Jones.  
> \- There's a lot of stuff about the (bad) effects of solitary confinement on children in output related to American juvenile criminal justice.  
> \- I'm not exactly sure of standard grave depth for this era, but I saw a much earlier text give the standard 'six feet', so I thought--probably all right.  
> \- I'm really not sure a linen shift is that long, soft or malleable. The V&A's underwear exhibition was both rubbish and inconclusive. Clearly what I'm thinking of is a slip, and one of those satiny ones, too. Basically, sorry about the shift. I'm not Heyer, mistress of details.  
> \- Davida did read Brontes in this, but then '1837' was ten years too early. There is oddly little out there about Dickens and the Brontes! Just some frankly weak claims about him 'picking up' the first person off them for DC and BH, which, k. Dickens at some point claimed not to have read Jane Eyre, but I haven't seen that in context.  
> \- I'm not entirely clear on whether they'd go to a public dance, re: class, though the hall ought to be about right. I'm relying on what Dick Swiveller does at the start of OCS with that initial fiance?  
> \- I don't think Davida could go to that pub theatre, even escorted, unless she pushed it.  
> \- 'Sod' is the term used in the Victorian porn odyssey My Secret Life.  
> \- HOW MANY SERVANTS ARE LIVING IN, HOW MANY ARE THERE, AND HOW MANY BEDROOMS DOES THIS STUPID HOUSE HAVE?!  
> \- Eh, Dickens gave few fucks about historical accuracy, we're good.
> 
> Please see the header of [Taken In](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7360414) for the note on citation/interpretation, if relevant.
> 
> **UPDATE**
> 
> There are a few other pairing fics behind flock here: http://x-losfic.livejournal.com/tag/david%2Furiah (and a B7 B/A one here: http://x-losfic.livejournal.com/65674.html).


End file.
